Happy and Mindless, But Sad and Smart? The Impact of Affective States on Analytic Reasoning

This chapter provides a selective review of some of the available evidence, focusing on the impact of affective states on analytic reasoning. It offers a theoretical framework for the conceptualization of affective influences on information processing. To begin with the most fundamental issue, the chapter considers why one might expect that individuals' affective state influences their mode of information processing, before he turn to some selective evidence. While the preceding discussion pertained to subjects' reasoning about the situation that elicited the affective state to begin with, the chapter provides information on the more intriguing possibility that the impact of affective states may generalize to other tasks that individuals work on while in that state. Evidence for the assumption that different affective states are associated with different styles of organizing information is also provided by Bless et al.