Mood and Perception: Do Others Look Better When You are Aroused? Heather Bloch & Regan A. R.

Gurung University of Wisconsin, Green Bay

INTRODUCTION

METHOD

RESULTS

DISCUSSIONABSTRACT

Everyone experiences some degree of emotion every minute of their day. These feelings can be projected on to others depending upon the situation that people find themselves in. People may appear more attractive when we are in a good mood and more unattractive if we are sad. We are constantly making social judgments and understanding why we tend to rate people certain ways or what influences those ratings is an important enterprise. Moods clearly influence judgments (Damasio, 2004; Forgas, 2003) but can they influence how attractive we think others are? The effect of sadness and happiness has been tested in various domains, but not as much research has examined emotions such as arousal and anxiety. This experiment rectifies this situation to further our understanding of how emotions influence perceived attractiveness.

Many theories suggest why emotions influence judgment. For example, the mood-congruence effect shows that when there is a match between someone’s mood and their thoughts, people will retrieve material from their memory that is congruent or matches the current mood state they are experiencing (Rusting, 1999; Mayer, Gaschke, Braverman, & Evans, 1992). It is also possible for physiological arousal to create feelings of attraction within people.

Three theories of arousal explain the effects that arousal has on attraction (Foster, Witcher, Campbell & Green, 1998). Misattribution suggests that “emotion is a physiological arousal followed by a cognitive label for that arousal. Negative reinforcement theory is useful when subjects have experienced arousal through fear in the past. When the subject interacts with a target that reduces the fear, the subject is negatively reinforced and therefore subjects perceive the target as more attractive (Foster et. al., 1998). The final theory of arousal is response-facilitation which suggests that “arousal heightens a specific dominant response for a given interpersonal attraction context. Arousal can be caused by pleasurable means (e.g., sexual arousal) or negative means (e.g., fear). Would these two states influence perceptions differently?

The experiment used a mixed factorial design, with mood as the one between-subjects variable. Attractiveness was the main dependent variable. We instilled four moods: happy, excited, neutral, and suspenseful.

Participants in this study were 176 undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay who were primarily students enrolled in an introduction to psychology course during the fall semester 2004, and fulfilled a course requirement. The mean age of subjects was 19.30 (SD = 2.78) and an age range of 18-45 years old. 57 of the participants were male while 119 were female. 107 were freshmen, 39 were sophomores, 19 were juniors, 8 were seniors and 3 classified them selves as “other”.

Materials: The experiment was conducted entirely through the use of Media Lab (Jarvis, 2000) on computers. Headphones were used so subjects would only hear the video being played in the condition they were participating in. The following video clips were used to elicit a certain mood in the subject. The videos and the moods they were to elicit were as follows: “Stealing Beauty” (Thomas, 1996) which elicited excitement, “Dangerous Attraction” (Buitenhuis, 1999) which generated suspense, “Amazing Wonders of the World-Kingdom of the West: Yellowstone, Yosemite & Glacier National Park” (Brooks & Walkenhorst, 1999) to bring for a neutral baseline mood, and “SNL-The Best of Adam Sandler” (Altman & Weis, 1999) to create a happy mood. Each video clip was approximately ten minutes long. There was also a short three and a half minute clip from “SNL-The Best of Adam Sandler” (Altman & Weis, 1999) viewed at the conclusion of all sessions that assured that all subjects would leave the research suite in a “happy” mood. The subjects also viewed target pictures of women who were either in a two-piece bikini or in casual clothing (blue jeans and a t-shirt that were well fitted); the faces on the women were blurred out. All of the target pictures came from previous studies in this lab.

Procedure: Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the four mood conditions, read and signed a consent form, and then began the experiment. Subjects provided demographic information, took the Self-Attributes Questionnaire, and then watched one of the four ten-minute video clips. Finally, the subjects viewed the target pictures and rated the women on perceived characteristics such as attractiveness, loyalty, and fitness using a 9 point scale (1=Not at All to 9 =Very much so).

There were no significant differences in attractiveness ratings across conditions. Targets were rated similarly on all the dependent variables. One possible reason why there was no difference in the ratings of the targets was that the mood manipulation did not sustain long enough. It was expected that the results would follow the mood-congruence effect, and that those subjects who were partaking in the excitement and happy conditions would rate the target pictures higher on attractiveness than the neutral condition. It was also expected for the neutral condition to rate the pictures higher than the suspense condition. Although a variety of mood manipulations have been successful and our manipulation clearly worked based on the differences in mood ratings, it is likely the induced mood faded before influencing ratings.

Another possible explanation is that the subjects may not have felt the situation was real enough. By not relating the target or the situation to themselves subjects may have made more objective and external judgments. If the subjects had been asked to make judgments about the targets by comparing themselves to the target there may have been a significant difference in those judgments. In essence, it is likely that the judgment was not realistic enough to the participants although we designed it to be similar to other studies conducted in the literature.

If the null findings do hold up in replications of this study, it would suggest that social judgments may not be as susceptible to transitory moods states as is commonly believed. Apart from findings such as those for depressive realism, it is possible that participants are capable of being objective, or at least do not let their personal mood states interact with their ratings.

Does feeling scared or aroused influence how attractive other people appear? We manipulated mood (happy, anxious, aroused, neutral) using video clips and tested if this influenced attractiveness ratings. Mood did not make a difference in ratings. We discuss implications of this finding for the study of social perception, body image and disorderly eating.

An ANOVA showed that the mood manipulation was significant. Participants in different conditions both rated the clips significantly differently (e.g., in level of humor, arousal, or educational value) and had different levels of moods in response (happy, tense, aroused).

The main question that this study intended to answer was whether or not perception was altered based on the mood that someone was experiencing. A MANCOVA, multivariate analysis of covariance, with condition as the between-subjects factor and controlled for sex was used to analyze the data. Even though there was a significant change in mood there were not significant differences in the ratings of the targets between conditions.

Presented at the 2005 American Psychological Society’s Annual Conference. Los Angeles, CA. Email: gurungr@uwgb.edu