| By now, it has been widely established that features of the environment that do not enter our conscious awareness can nonetheless impact us in various ways, including our mood state. Studies using subliminal priming of positive or negative stimuli have shown that such primes can affect our mood in a congruent manner, and that these "mystery moods"---or moods of an unknown origin---have further, downstream consequences.;Previous research on nonconsciously induced moods has focused solely on stimuli that varied on the valence dimension (i.e., positive vs. negative). The current research examined another dimension of mystery moods---namely, the degree to which the source of the mood implicates the self, and how it may interact with the valence dimension to produce different consequences for information processing and self-esteem enhancement.;Four studies tested the hypothesis that when a mystery mood is non-self-referent, positive mood leads to heuristic information processing while negative mood results in systematic information processing. One consequence of this difference in processing strategy is stereotyping, such that people are less likely to stereotype when they are processing information in a careful, systematic fashion. Thus, being in a non-self-referent mystery mood results in consequences that are of a cold, cognitive nature. On the other hand, when a mystery mood is self-referent, a hot, motivational process is activated. In the case of a negative self-referent mood, which is akin to a self-esteem threat, it can result in using stereotyping as a way to restore one's self-esteem. Thus, the consequences of being in a self-referent mood can be different from the consequences of non-self-referent moods of the same valence. Overall, this research adds to the literature on mood and stereotyping by clarifying the conditions under which cognitive versus motivational mechanisms of stereotyping dominate. This research also makes an important contribution to the mood priming literature by showing that the degree of self-reference is a key dimension to consider in the mystery mood phenomenon. |
