The effects of mood on spontaneous and online impression formation during personal information encoding:Varying inputted individuating information on targets as judgment cues

Abstract

This study examined the effect of mood on spontaneous and online impression formation when personal information was encountered. In an experiment (N=72), a time constraint was imposed in judging to assure that participants were forming spontaneous impression in encoding. The results showed a greater mood effect was found under limited time conditions as compared to non-limited time conditions, when the inputted individual information was highly related to the trait to be evaluated. On the other hand, the impression was not affected by mood regardless of time constraints, when the inputted individual information was less related to the trait to be evaluated. The implications of the results, when the inputted information was directly useful, were that the initial spontaneous impression affected by mood was utilized to form final judgments. However, the implication of the results, when the inputted information was of little use, it was difficult for participants to utilize the initial spontaneous impressions in forming final judgments, even if the initial impression was affected by mood. Therefore participants rated the stimulus person neutrally because they could not clearly does.