Numerous studies show that happy individuals are successful across multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health. The authors suggest a conceptual model to account for these findings, arguing that the happiness-success link exists not only because success makes people happy, but also because positive affect engenders success. Three classes of evidence--crosssectional, longitudinal, and experimental--are documented to test their model. Relevant studies are described and their effect sizes combined meta-analytically. The results reveal that happiness is associated with and precedes numerous successful outcomes, as well as behaviors paralleling success. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that positive affect--the hallmark of well-being--may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness. Limitations, empirical issues, and important future research questions are discussed.

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The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?

Mother Nature knows best--How engineered organizations of the future will resemble natural-born systems.

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

A review is presented of the book “Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment,” edited by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman.

Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment

Evidence for the role of affective states in social judgments is reviewed, and a new integrative theory, the affect infusion model (AIM), is proposed as a comprehensive explanation of these effects. The AIM, based on a multiprocess approach to social judgments, identifies 4 alternative judgmental strategies: (a) direct access, (b) motivated, (c) heuristic, and (d) substantive processing. The model predicts that the degree of affect infusion into judgments varies along a processing continuum, such that judgments requiring heuristic or substantive processing are more likely to be infused by affect than are direct access or motivated judgments. The role of target, judge, and situational variables in recruiting high- or low-infusion judgmental strategies is considered, and empirical support for the model is reviewed. The relationship between the AIM and other affect-cognition theories is discussed, and implications for future research are outlined.

Mood and judgment: the affect infusion model (AIM).

Much research in the last two decades has demon- strated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision mak- ing and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be inter- preted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experi- menter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implica- tions of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap. Performance er- rors are a minor factor in the gap; computational limitations un- derlie non-normative responding on several tasks, particularly those that involve some type of cognitive decontextualization. Un- expected patterns of covariance can suggest when the wrong norm is being applied to a task or when an alternative construal of the task should be considered appropriate.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X00003435

Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?

Motivational and cognitive mediators of the reduced processing of persuasive messages shown by recipients in a positive mood were tested. Ss in positive or neutral moods read strong or weak counterattitudinal advocadies for either a limited time or for as long as they wanted. Under limited exposure conditions, neutral mood Ss showed attitude change indicative of systemic processing, whereas positive mood Ss showed no differentiation of strong and weak versions of the message. When message exposure was unlimited, positive mood Ss viewed the message longer than did neutral mood Ss and systematically processed it rather than relying on persuasion heuristics. These findings replicated with 2 manipulations of mood and 2 different attitude issues. We interpret the results as providing evidence that reduced cognitive capacity to process the message contributes to the decrements shown by positive mood Ss.

Processing deficits and the mediation of positive affect in persuasion.

Two studies investigated the processes mediating the persuasive impact of messages representing in-group opinions. In the 1st study, subjects read either a strong or a weak message attributed to either an in-group member or to another group. Subjects were more persuaded by a strong message from the in-group than a weak one, suggesting content-focused processing of the in-group message. Subjects were equally unpersuaded by either a strong or a weak message from the other group, and showed little sign of message processing. In the 2nd study, Ss listened to in-group or other-group messages about issues that varied in their relevance to in-group membership. When the issue was relevant to the in-group, subjects were persuaded by a strong message from the in-group, unpersuaded by a weak message from the in-group, and equally unimpressed by strong and weak messages from the other group. When the issue was irrelevant to the in-group, subjects accepted the position advocated by the in-group regardless of message quality, and again ignored messages from the other group. These results suggest that increased message processing, and not merely the impact of source persuasion cues, can underlie in-group-mediated attitude change.

Processing of persuasive in-group messages.

This study explored the impact of positive mood on the cognitive processes mediating attitude change in response to a persuasive communication. Subjects in either a good mood or a neutral mood were exposed to either a proattitudinal or a counterattitudinal message comprised of either strong or weak arguments. Subjects were also provided with a persuasion cue that could be used to judge the validity of the message without processing message content. As expected, subjects in a positive mood exhibited both attitude change and cognitive responses that were indicative of reduced systematic processing. Relative to subjects in a neutral mood, subjects in a good mood showed attitude change that was significantly less influenced by manipulations of message quality, and tended to be more influenced by the presence or absence of the persuasion cue. Subjects experiencing a positive mood recalled less of the message, and their cognitive responses differentiated less between strong and weak arguments and more between t...

Cognitive Mediation of Positive Affect in Persuasion

Razran argued that the affect associated with the positive (food) or negative (odors) stimuli transferred to the contiguously presented slogans, increasing agreement with slogans seen while eating and decreasing agreement with slogans seen while smelling noxious odors. This associationist interpretation received further support from later studies demonstrating that repeated pairing of a word with a positive or negative stimulus influenced the word’s evaluative rating Recent research on attitude change has investigated two different types of information processing strategies that people might adopt when they encounter persuasive communications. Each of these processing strategies culminates in a series of judgments about the validity of the persuasive message or its contents, judgments which in turn determine persuasion. The exposure time manipulation thus had a substantial impact on the attitude change shown by subjects in a good mood.

Feeling Good, But Not Thinking Straight: The Impact of Positive Mood on Persuasion

Previous research suggests that people subscribe to ethnocentric “mirror images” of their own country and enemy countries—one's own country is believed moral, whereas one's enemy is believed diabolical. The present research examined the role of value-guided attributions in maintaining those images, whereby the actions of one's own country are attributed to altruistic motives but the identical actions taken by an enemy are attributed to self-serving motives. In two experiments, American students made value-guided attributions consistent with the moral self-image and the diabolical enemy-image. In a third experiment, by contrast, Canadian subjects attributed Soviet and American actions to the same motives, with the exception that only the United States was perceived as engaging in positive actions for self-serving reasons.

Leila T. Worth

Papers

Processing deficits and the mediation of positive affect in persuasion.

Processing of persuasive in-group messages.

Cognitive Mediation of Positive Affect in Persuasion

Feeling Good, But Not Thinking Straight: The Impact of Positive Mood on Persuasion

Value‐Guided Attributions: Maintaining the Moral Self‐Image and the Diabolical Enemy‐Image