Mood, categorization breadth, and performance appraisal: The effects of order of information acquisition and affective state on halo, accuracy, information retrieval, and evaluations

Abstract

Primacy effects and variations in mood affect impression formation. These biases should also affect performance appraisal. The present study investigated the effects of order of information acquisition and mood state on performance appraisal decisions. Recent theoretical research suggests that subjects in depressed moods should display less halo and greater accuracy in judgments than subjects in elated moods, since subjects in good moods have been shown to be broader categorizers. Subjects in good moods should make more positive evaluations and retrieve more positive and less negative information than subjects in bad moods (mood congruency). Order of information acquisition should result in primacy effects. Subjects initially received either a greater proportion of positive or negative behavioral information regarding a target's performance. In a supposedly unrelated second study, subjects were put into either elated, neutral, or depressed mood states. Subjects wrote a brief description of their impressions of a target, evaluated the target on four global measures and on eight specific behavioral scales (evaluation measures), and finally recalled all the behavioral information that they could (memory measures). The predicted main effects for order of information acquisition and mood were confirmed, but no interactions were seen, suggesting that encoding and retrieval biases may act independently. Subjects in depressed states displayed the least amount of halo and greatest accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of encoding and retrieval biases, as well as categorization breadth and automaticity in performance appraisal. Cautionary notes regarding the generalizability of the findings are also discussed.