Mood and Behavior Perception: Dysphoria Can Increase and Decrease Effortful Processing of Information

Abstract

In the affect and cognition literature, some studies demonstrate that dysphoric mood increases effortful processing of social and nonsocial information, but others demonstrate that it decreases such processing. Five studies examined the effect of dysphoric mood on perceivers' subjective unitization of an observed other's ongoing behavior into discrete meaningful actions. Dysphoria generally reduced unitization rate (i.e., number of actions discriminated). Additional evidence indicates that this reduction likely results from failure to initiate a higher (more effortful) unitization rate rather than from inability to achieve such a level of processing. Data also suggest that dysphoric mood can actually increase unitization rate when adopting that mode of processing might relieve the dysphoria. It is concluded that dysphoric mood may lead perceivers to exhibit a more discriminating "cognitive palate" in terms of how much effort they choose to expend on processing available information.