Mood influences on helping: Direct effects or side effects?

Abstract

A review of the literature concerning the promotive influence of experimentally generated happiness and sadness on helping suggested that (a) increased helping among saddened subjects is an instrumental response designed to dispel the helper's negative mood state, and (b) increased helping among elated subjects is not an instrumental response to (maintain) the heightened effect but is a concomitant of elevated mood. A derivation from this hypothesis—that enhanced helping is a direct effect of induced sadness but a side effect of induced happiness—was tested in an experiment that placed subjects in a happy, neutral, or sad mood. Through a placebo drug manipulation, half of the subjects in each group were led to believe that their induced moods were temporarily fixed, that is, temporarily resistant to change from normal events. The other subjects believed that their moods were labile and, therefore, manageable. As expected, saddened subjects showed enhanced helping only when they believed their moods to be changeable, whereas elated subjects showed comparable increases in helping whether they believed their moods to be labile or fixed. An impressively large body of experimental work indicates that adult benevolence is increased by a variety of mood-inducing procedures. Interestingly, such procedures have been shown to enhance helping when they have led either to the temporary mood state of happiness or sadness (cf. Cialdini, Baumann, & Kenrick, 1981; Krebs, 1970; Rosenhan, Karylowski, Salovey, & Hargis, 1981). One general interpretive account of this pattern is that helping occurs as an active response designed to manage the temporary mood state. That is, individuals help so as to relieve their own sadness and maintain happiness. A presumption of this instrumental view of mood-based benevolence is that adult altruism possesses a self-gratifyin g quality that allows it to influence mood state favorably. Evidence that altruists find prosocial action rewarding comes from several sources. Weiss and his coworkers (Weiss, Boyer, Lombardo, & Stitch, 1973; Weiss, Buchanan, Alstatt, & Lombardo,