The impact of mood on information use in judgments of relationship satisfaction

The hypothesis in Study 1 was that positive mood leads people to rely on both central and peripheral features of relationship quality when making global satisfaction judgments concerning their relationship with a spouse or partner, whereas sadness leads people to focus more exclusively on central features. For German university students, correlational analyses, within mood condition, of feature ratings with satisfaction judgments, both obtained following mood induction, revealed results consistent with the hypothesis. Study 2 again addressed the differential breadth of feature processing, by having a different group of German students categorize features of relationship quality after mood induction. As expected, participants in the positive mood condition used the fewest categories, whereas those in the neutral and sad mood conditions used the most categories.