Social desirability and self-reports of mood: a rejoinder

Warehime and Jones found moderate correlations between social desirability and short-term mood level scores on the Wessman-Ricks Personal Feeling Scales. They suggested that it might be valuable to study patterns of dissimulation in self-reports of immediate feeling states. In the present authors' studies involving long-term mood reports and multivariate methods, social desirability was shown to have a moderately weak relationship with measures of mood level and mood variability. Under conditions of confidentiality and good rapport, repeated self-reports of mood appeared to share more variance with important personality characteristics and situational influences than with social desirability per se.