Why do highly visible people appear more important?: Affect mediates visual fluency effects in impression formation

Abstract

People who are highly visible may be perceived as also more important and influential. Can good or bad moods influence the extent to which people rely on such irrelevant visual fluency cues when forming impressions? Based on recent work on affect and cognition, two experiments predicted and found that positive affect increased, and negative affect eliminated the effects of visual fluency on impressions. In Experiment 1, after an autobiographical mood induction participants read about two people whose visual fluency was factorially manipulated by changing the size and color of their photos. Both mood and visual fluency influenced impressions, and there was a significant mood by visibility interaction such that positive affect increased, and negative affect eliminated the effects of visual fluency. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a different mood induction, and also found that mood-induced differences in information processing style mediated these effects. The relevance of these findings for impression formation in everyday situations is considered, and their implications for recent affect–cognition theories are discussed.