The role of state self-esteem in positive mood effects on person impression: When does a positive mood lead to a favorable view of others?

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1 Japanese Psychological Research 2002, Volume 44, No. 1, Blackwell ORIGINAL Science, ARTICLE Ltd The role of state self-esteem in positive mood effects on person impression: When does a positive mood lead to a favorable view of others? TOMOKO IKEGAMI Department of School Education, Aichi University of Education, Hirosawa, Igaya-chou, Kariya , Japan Abstract: Subjects in a positive or a neutral mood were engaged in an impression formation task (Experiment 1), and in a word fragment completion task (Experiment 2). A self-referent versus other-referent sentence completion task was used to induce a positive mood state. As a result, the subjects exhibited mood congruent effects on impression ratings in the selfreferent but not in the other-referent mood induction condition. Word completion data, however, indicated that relevant traits (i.e., friendly traits) had been equally activated across the two mood induction conditions. It was also demonstrated that the self-referent induction procedure was effective in enhancing the level of self-esteem, whereas the other-referent one was not. The results converged to suggest that the enhancement in state self-esteem accompanying the self-referent procedure might be relevant to positive mood effects on person impression. This indicates the limitation of the mood priming model. Key words: mood effects, person impression, state self-esteem, word completion task. It is now well understood that people feeling good are more friendly. Numerous works in both laboratory and naturalistic settings have come to show that a positive mood increases the tendency of viewing other people favourably, promotes a helpful and sociable behavior towards others, and reduces interpersonal conflict in interaction such as bargaining and negotiations (Forgas, Bower, & Krantz, 1984; Forgas, & Bower, 1987; Forgas, Bower, & Moylan, 1990; Forgas, Levinger, & Moylan, 1994; Forgas, 1998; See also Isen, 1987, 1999 for a review). The most influential and parsimonious account of such positive mood effects has been the associative network theory of affect, namely the mood-priming model (Bower, 1981, 1991; Bower, & Cohen, 1982; Forgas, 1999). This model assumes that a material in memory that is congruent with the current mood state in the affective valence is activated, made more accessible, and becomes more likely to be used in various types of cognitive processing, leading to a marked mood congruent effect on memory, evaluation and judgement. According to the network theory, positive ideas and concepts in memory are automatically activated (i.e., primed) when a positive mood state is induced, facilitating positive or favorable thinking about others. The network theory also predicts that mood effects on cognitive processes come to occur regardless of the nature of mood-inducing events. It has basically been assumed that mood experiences should result in similar effects only if they share the same affective valence (Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993; Isen, 1999 etc). Although previous research on mood effects has mostly been limited to examinations on how general affective antecedents, simply characterised as positive or negative, come to influence cognitive or behavioural consequences, more and more researchers are now coming to recognise the limitation of such simplistic characterisations of affective states. Several studies in fact have demonstrated that 2002 Japanese Psychological Association. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

2 Self-esteem and positive mood effects 21 distinct feelings of the same valence (sadness, anger, fear) have different effects on judgement (e.g. Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993; Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994; Lerner, & Keltner, 2000). Green and Sedikides (1999) have recently argued that the relation between affective states and attentional focus can be illuminated more clearly by the combination of the dimension of affect orientation (i.e., reflective-social) with the valence dimension (i.e., positive-negative) than by the single dimension. Some studies have also attempted to examine specific effects that different mood induction procedures might have on cognitive processes, when such procedures have equivalent effects on mood states in intensity and valence (Ikegami, 1993a; Rholes, Riskind, & Lane, 1987). These studies seemingly suggest that not only the valence but also the meaning structure of a mood-altering experience will have a substantial effect on the capacity of the moodstate to influence one s cognitive processing. This suggestion applies well to the relation between a positive mood and friendliness. In the research area of helping, some studies have attempted to not only equate the moodstate in valence and intensity, but also to show at the same time that the effects of that mood depend on the direction of attention during the mood induction. For example, Rosenhan, Salovey, & Harris (1981) manipulated the mood states of participants by letting them imagine a happy event about themselves (self-focus) or about their friends (other focus). They showed that a self-focused, positive mood leads more to helping than an equally positive other-focused mood. Berkowitz (1987) also investigated the joint operation of mood and self-focus on the willingness to help, and found a similar pattern of results. The common idea in these studies is that a self-conception of a sense of oneself being advantaged, as created by the mood induction procedure, is the critical factor influencing the likelihood of helping. The study by Cunningham (1988) might be worth a mention in passing. He examined the relative impact of self-relevant versus nonself-relevant mood inductions on different males social interaction and self-disclosure with a female. In the self-relevant condition, the mood states of the subjects were altered by bogus feedback techniques, while in the nonself-relevant condition, the mood states were altered using video films containing no explicit self-relevant stimuli. It was shown that the self-relevant condition was effective in altering both the subjects self-esteem and mood states, while the non-self-relevant condition was effective in altering only the subjects moods. Consequently, but unexpectedly, the self-relevant and non-self-relevant mood conditions generally produced equal effects on the subjects communication behaviors (e.g. selfdisclosure). His study, however, as the author himself described, could not exclude the possibility that seeing the video films had brought memories to mind that enhanced the subjects self-image, although this was not evident in the self-esteem measure, because the mental associations and inferences during the mood inductions remained obscure in his study. Besides, the employed self-esteem measure consisted of only two items, raising doubt about whether or not the measure had fully covered the subjects whole self-concepts. Sedikides (1992a,b) argued that a positive mood itself produces momentary positive selfevaluation, which creates certainty about self-worth. He stated that this elicits externalfocused attention, allowing an extroverted orientation and an active social engagement. Although Sedikides (1992b) mentioned that the effects of one s mood on attention are independent of the self-focusing nature of mood-inducing events, there is room for further discussion. One might possibly argue from the empirical studies mentioned above that the psychological processes that he described might be more likely to be instigated by self-evaluative rather than non-self-evaluative mood inducing events. If this is so, positive mood effects on sociability and friendliness can be expected to be more pronounced in the former than in the latter case. However, the studies mentioned above all addressed the behavioral level (i.e., helping or communicative behaviors), and little evidence is available concerning the cognitive level, namely person perception or impression formation.

3 22 T. Ikegami From the literature available on self-esteem, one could at least argue that people with high self-esteem are more likely to be socially adept and more able to form friendly relationships with or favorable attitudes toward others (e.g. Berger, 1952; Fey, 1954; Ikegami, 1993b; see Baumeister, 1998 for an extensive review). In fact, voluminous amounts of research have been performed on self-esteem and its effects on social and interpersonal aspects of human behavior, but most of them have focused on self-esteem as a trait. One reason for this is that fluctuations in state self-esteem have been thought to be difficult to untangle from those of mood states (Baumeister, 1998). Heatherton and Polivy (1991) pointed out that not a few mood induction procedures possibly altered the level of self-esteem as well as mood states, leading to the conceptual and psychometric confounding of self-esteem and mood. They then developed a new scale, tapping into a relatively wide range of self-concepts, and demonstrated its validity for untangling the confounded relation between self-esteem and mood. Yet little continues to be known about how differently state self-esteem versus mood per se will influence cognitive or behavioral processes. If it is often the case that mood is contaminated with self-esteem in real life situations, it is important, both theoretically and practically, to investigate how these two operate jointly to produce psychological consequences. Accordingly, the present study aims at investigating how temporary enhanced selfesteem accompanying a positive-mood induction relates to friendliness. Ikegami (1991, 1993c, 1996) addressed this issue, not directly but indirectly, focusing on the relation between a positive mood and person impression. She invented a new easierto-control mood-inducing device in order to elucidate the mental associations of subjects during the mood induction procedure (even if by group administration), and provided intriguing empirical data. In these studies, self-referent or other-referent sentence completion tasks were used to induce a positive mood in the subjects. The self-referent task was constructed so as to call the subjects attention to positive aspects of themselves, while the other-referent task was designed so as to invoke positive ideas about others. These two types of mood induction procedures were proved equally effective in producing positive moods. Nevertheless, it was shown that positive mood effects on person impressions regarding friendliness were more pronounced when the mood was induced by the self-referent task than by the other-referent task. More specifically, the subjects rated the target person as more friendly in an impression formation task under the self-referent condition than under the other-referent condition. It is important to note that the nature of the mood inducing tasks did not affect the performance of word completion tasks. It is well known that word completion tasks have been proved to be especially sensitive to the prior activation of the internal representations of trait concepts in memory (Bassili, & Smith, 1986). The wordcompletion data in the studies by Ikegami (1993c, 1996) indicated that friendly traits are equally activated and made more accessible across the self-referent and other-referent conditions. These results are inconsistent with contentions derived from the network model of mood effects. The network model relies on the idea of the accessibility theory that people will unconditionally use trait constructs that are most accessible when interpreting behavioral events (Higgins, & King, 1981; Wyer, & Srull, 1981). On the contrary, the results suggest that the high accessibility of friendly traits does not always lead to higher ratings on the friendliness dimension for the target. One might argue that a person would apply mood-primed friendly traits to the behaviors of the target were the mood to be accompanied by a momentarily-enhanced self-esteem. In other words, when a positive mood is experienced, friendly traits that are congruent with the mood-state in the affective valence are automatically and indiscriminately activated regardless of the status of the state self-esteem. However, whether the person is motivated to use those mood-primed traits in impression formation depends on his/her level of self-esteem. In

4 Self-esteem and positive mood effects 23 sum, spreading activation processes triggered by one s mood per se and enhanced selfesteem accompanying a mood altering experience possibly operate in an integrative fashion to produce positive mood effects on person impression. This interpretation, however, needs further investigation because these studies have not provided direct evidence that self-referent tasks actually enhance the level of self-esteem of a person. Therefore, in order to elucidate the role of state self-esteem in producing positive mood effects on person impression, the present study attempted to directly assess the level of self-esteem using the State-Self-Esteem Scale (SSES) developed by Heatherton and Polivy (1991). This scale, as described earlier, has been proved to be valid as a manipulation check index of state self-esteem and enables us to measure changes when evaluating multiple aspects of the self. Overview of the study Two experiments were conducted in the present study. Experiment 1 examined whether a temporary change in one s self-esteem accompanying a mood induction might be involved in positive mood effects on person impression. Experiment 2 tested whether a self-referent procedure versus an other-referent mood induction procedure should be equally capable of activating friendliness-related trait concepts in memory. The primary concern of the present study was to verify the hypothesis that a momentarily-enhanced self-esteem will increase the likelihood of viewing others favorably and applying mood-primed friendly traits to the behavioral events elicited by the target person. Experiment 1 The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine whether a self-referent task and an otherreferent positive mood induction task have differential effects on the friendliness rating of the target in the impression formation stage. Method Subjects. One hundred and seven (44 male, 63 female) college students participated in Experiment 1. The subjects were randomly assigned to one of three mood induction conditions. Eighteen subjects were omitted because their data suggested that experimental manipulations did not work appropriately. 1 Consequently, the data of 89 subjects (32 male, 57 female) were submitted to analyses. There were 32 subjects (11 male, 21 female) in the positive self-referent condition, 29 subjects (12 male, 17 female) in the positive other-referent condition, and 28 subjects (9 male, 19 female) in the control condition. Procedure. The following experimental tasks were conducted by group administration under the pretext of the Verbal Comprehension and Verbal Expression Test. The subjects were told that the purpose of the study was to investigate how the different kinds of verbal abilities assessed by the four tests relate to each other. Booklets containing the materials for two filler tasks, one type of mood-induction task, and an impression-formation task were provided and distributed to the undergraduates taking a course in introductory psychology. A mood-state questionnaire as well as the SSES was included in the booklet. The two filler tasks were taken from the set of sub-tests that were utilized for measuring verbal ability in K.U. NX15-Intelligence Test (Osaka, & Umemoto, 1968). The subjects were first engaged in the two filler tasks following the standard procedure. These two tasks were succeeded by the experimental tasks below. The session took approximately 25 min. 1. Mood induction task. Sentence completion tasks were used as a mood-eliciting device 1 Three subjects were deleted for the reason that their responses in the sentence-completion tasks were judged inappropriate. Twelve subjects were eliminated because their mood scores suggested that the mood manipulations did not work appropriately. Two subjects were omitted because of the poor recall performance (recalled less than five items) in the impression formation task. One subject was eliminated because he was suspicious about the purpose of the experiment.

5 24 T. Ikegami as was done in the studies by Ikegami (1991, 1993c, 1996). Three mood induction conditions (positive self-referent, positive other-referent, and control) were included in Experiment 1. The subjects were engaged in positive self-referent, positive other-referent, or control sentencecompletion tasks according to the experimental condition to which they had been assigned. The three types of tasks were as follows: (i) Positive self-referent task. This task was constructed to alter the subjects affective states in the positive direction by evoking self-enhancing ideas on the subjects part. The subjects were asked to complete sentences such as I feel selfconfident that. (ii) Positive other-referent task. This task was constructed to elicit a positive mood by making other-enhancing ideas come into the subjects minds. The subjects were asked to complete sentences beginning with, for example, I feel gratitude towards others, when they. (iii) Control task. This was a task constructed to elicit neither a positive nor negative mood. The subjects were presented with such beginning phrases as When I describe something to others, I. For each task condition, six items were constructed and printed on a sheet of paper. In all of the three task conditions, the subjects were allowed 6 min to complete six sentences. A preliminary study has already proven that the former two types of tasks can elicit approximately the same amount of positive mood (see Ikegami, 1996). 2. Mood rating. After finishing the sentence completion tasks, all the subjects were asked to rate their own subjective mood states on eight mono-polar adjective scales. Half of these scales were positively valenced (comfortable, cheerful, peaceful, happy), and the other half were negatively valenced (irritated, gloomy, depressive, unpleasant). The subjects rated the extent to which each adjective described their current mood states on a 5-point scale (1 indicated not at all and 5 indicated extremely ). 3. Administration of SSES. Next, the subjects completed the State Self-Esteem Scale (SSES) developed by Heatherton and Polivy (1991). This scale consists of 20 items measuring the performance selfesteem, social self-esteem, and appearance self-esteem (i.e., I feel confident about my abilities, I am worried about looking foolish, I feel unattractive, respectively). The total score indicates the global selfesteem at a certain point in time. The original statements were translated into the Japanese language and printed on a sheet of paper. The subjects were instructed to answer the questions whether they were true of themselves at that moment. Each item was scored on a 5-point scale (1 indicated not at all, 2 indicated a little bit, 3 indicated somewhat, 4 indicated very much, and 5 indicated extremely ). 4. Impression formation task. The subjects were asked to form an impression of the target person based on behavioral descriptions of him, which were read by the experimenter only once. The descriptions consisted of a paragraph of 20 sentences, which contained five somewhat friendly but ambiguously depicted behaviors of the target person (e.g. inviting his friend to his home; proposing to introduce a car-repair shop to his friend). The paragraph had been originally constructed for use in the study by Ikegami and Kawaguchi (1989), and proved to be substantially susceptible to the mood priming in Ikegami (1991, 1993c, 1996). The subjects rated the target person on 12 mono-polar, 7-point trait scales (1 indicated not at all and 7 indicated extremely ). Six of the trait scales were relevant to friendliness-hostility. Three were denotatively positive (warm, kind, considerate), and the other three were denotatively negative (cold, nasty, selfish). The remaining six scales were irrelevant to friendliness-hostility but relevant to competence-incompetence. Three were positively valenced (competent, reliable,

6 Self-esteem and positive mood effects 25 active) and three were negatively valenced (incompetent, unreliable, inactive). 5. Recall test. On completion of the impression ratings, a 5-minute incidental recall test was administered in order to check if the subjects were listening attentively to the paragraph. The subjects were instructed to recall and write down as many details as possible from the paragraph that they had just heard. Since there were no appreciable differences in the recall performance across the three mood-induction conditions, the results of the recall test were omitted from the present article. 6. Final check. Finally the subjects were again asked to fill out the mood state questionnaire and then the SSES in order to check if the effect of the mood induction procedure continued till the end of the experimental session. The questionnaire also checked if any of the subjects was suspicious about the purpose of the experiment and if any of them was aware that his/her impression ratings had been influenced by the mood induced by the preceding sentence completion task. Debriefing followed. Results Preliminary analyses revealed that there were no significant sex differences on any of the dependent measures, and so the data of the male and female subjects were combined in the following analyses. Mood manipulation checks. The ratings on the four positive mood scales were summed up to yield a positive mood score (Cronbach s alpha =.825), whereas the ratings on the four negative mood scales were summed up to yield a negative mood score (Cronbach s alpha =.758). Furthermore, to assess the net amount of positive mood being elicited, a positivity score was devised by subtracting the negative mood score from the positive mood score. The positivity scores for the first mood rating and the second mood rating for each mood induction condition were submitted to a two-way analysis of variance, with the mood condition as a between-subjects factor and the time of rating as a within-subject factor. As a result, the main effect due to the mood condition was significant (F(2,86) = 23.43, p <.001), and so the scores were subjected to multiple comparison tests using Fisher s least significant difference method. It was shown that the positivity scores of both the self-referent (M = 5.21, SD = 3.12) and the other-referent (M = 6.12, SD = 3.87) conditions were significantly higher at p <.05 than the positivity score of the control condition (M = 0.96, SD =1.66). The difference between the self-referent and other-referent conditions was not significant. Additionally, neither the main effect of the time of rating nor the interactional effect between the mood condition and time of rating was significant (F(1,86) < 1, F(2,86) < 1, respectively). These results, therefore, confirmed that the self-referent and other-referent mood induction procedures successfully elicited equivalent amounts of positive moods for the subjects included in the analysis, and also confirmed that the induced mood state was unchanged till the end of the experimental session in all of the three mood conditions. Self-esteem state. A reliability analysis was conducted based on the scores of the first rating session. Since the alpha coefficients changed very little even if items were deleted (ranging from.76 to.79), the total self-esteem score was computed by adding the 20 item scores to show that the greater score might indicate higher self-esteem (Cronbach s alpha =.787). The self-esteem scores for the first rating and the second rating for each mood condition were subjected to a two-way analysis of variance with the mood condition as a betweensubjects factor and the time of rating as a within-subject factor. The main effect due to the mood condition was significant (F(2,86) = 9.44, p <.001). Fisher s least significance difference test showed that the self-esteem score of the self-referent condition (M = 64.72, SD = 6.84) was significantly higher at p <.05 than those of the other-referent condition (M = 55.40, SD = 10.76) and control condition (M = SD = 10.78). Although the main effect of the time of rating was significant (F(1,86) = 5.09, p <.05), indicating that the scores rose slightly from the first time to the second time in all of the three mood conditions, there were no

7 26 T. Ikegami Table 1. Mean ratings for each trait scale as a function of the mood induction condition in Experiment 1 Trait Scale Positive Self-Referent (N = 32) Condition Positive Other-Referent (N = 29) Control (N = 28) Friendliness a (2.64) b (2.85) b (3.60) Hostility 6.50 a (2.99) 6.41 a (2.95) 7.21 a (3.41) Competence a (2.98) a (3.15) a (2.83) Incompetence 7.34 a (3.45) 7.76 a (3.56) 7.46 a (3.69) Rating scores could range from 3 to 21. Means in the same row that do not share subscripts differ at p <.05 in Fisher s least significant difference test. Numerical values in parentheses indicate standard deviations. interactional effects of the mood condition and time of rating (F(2,86) < 1). Therefore, one might conclude that only the self-referent mood induction procedure had a substantial impact on the state self-esteem and that the created differences in the self-esteem across the three mood conditions were constant throughout the experimental session. Impression formation task. For each subject, impression ratings were summed up over the three relevant scales for each trait of friendliness, hostility, competence, and incompetence (Cronbach s alpha =.819,.689,.557,.797, in turn). The mean scores for each trait as a function of the mood condition are shown in Table 1. A one-way analysis of variance was performed separately on each score of the four traits. The main effect due to the mood condition was significant for the friendliness score (F(2,86) = 8.16, p <.01), but not significant for the other three scores (F(2,86) s < (1). Fisher s least significance difference test showed that the subjects in the self-referent condition rated the target as more friendly than did those in the other two conditions. The subjects in the other-referent condition, however, rated the target as no more friendly than those in the control condition. In summary, the self-referent mood induction biased the impression of the target in the mood congruent direction; whereas, the other-referent mood induction did not produce such a mood-congruent effect. Correlational analysis. In order to provide complementary evidence for our assumption, correlation coefficients between self-esteem scores and impression ratings were computed. It was found that only the friendliness rating was significantly correlated with selfesteem, r =.24, at p <.05, for all of the subjects and r =.31, at p <.05, for the subjects in the self-referent and the other-referent conditions. This indicated that the more enhancing the state self-esteem one experienced at the individual level, the friendlier one rated the target. Discussion The network theory of affect predicts that when a positive mood is experienced, positive trait constructs are made more accessible and are more likely to be used in the current cognitive processing, thereby producing mood congruent effects. This prediction was confirmed in the self-referent mood induction condition, but not in the other-referent condition in the present study. This pattern of results was basically the same as that obtained in Ikegami (1991, 1993c, 1996). Judging from both the mood rating results and SSES results, it can be concluded that the mood states did not differ between the selfreferent and other-referent conditions, whereas the state self-esteem was different between the two conditions. Therefore, the differences obtained in the impression ratings mentioned above might have been attributed to the differences in the self-esteem states between the two mood conditions. Since the data from SSES

8 Self-esteem and positive mood effects 27 clearly showed that the level of the subjects self-esteem was higher in the self-referent condition than in the other-referent condition, one may say that a momentarily-enhanced self-esteem promoted the use of mood-primed constructs (i.e., friendly traits) in the impressionformation task. The results of a correlational analysis also supported this notion. However, whether friendly trait constructs were equally activated across the self-referent versus other-referent mood conditions in Experiment 1 did not become clear, and therefore we could not exclude the alternative possibility that the results stemmed from differences in the activation levels of the friendly trait constructs in memory between the two conditions. Accordingly, Experiment 2 was conducted to exclude this interpretive ambiguity. Experiment 2 In Experiment 2, a word-fragment completion task was used to examine whether the selfreferent and other-referent mood induction procedures might be equally capable of activating the friendly trait constructs in memory. Method Subjects. Ninety-three college students (34 male and 59 female) participated in Experiment 2. The subjects were randomly assigned to one of three mood induction conditions (positive self-referent, positive other-referent, and control). Fourteen subjects were omitted for the same reason as in Experiment 1. 2 Therefore, the data of 79 subjects (30 male, 49 female) were submitted to the analyses. There were 28 subjects (10 male, 18 female) in the positive self-referent condition, 26 subjects (11 male, 15 female) in the positive other-referent condition, and 25 subjects (9 male, 16 female) in the control condition. 2 Four subjects were deleted for the inappropriateness of their responses in the sentence-completion tasks. Ten subjects were eliminated for failure of the mood manipulations. None of the subjects was aware of the connection between the mood-inducing sentence completion task and the word-fragment completion task. Stimulus Material. For the word fragment completion task, 40 friendly and 40 neutral words were collected in advance. The friendly words were prepared by choosing from a list of trait adjectives in Aoki (1971) and Hayashi (1978). The neutral words were chosen from test items on a word-completion test included as a sub-test in K.U. NX 15-Intelligence Test (Osaka, & Umemoto, 1968). All of these words consisted of four to six letters if they were written in the hiragana script. Thirty friendly and 30 neutral words were selected based on the rating data gathered in a preliminary study, where 32 undergraduates (14 male, 18 female) rated the degree to which each word related with hostility-friendliness on a 7-point scale (1 indicated extremely related with hostility; 7 indicated extremely related with friendliness). The averaged ratings of the selected friendly and neutral words were 5.76 (SD =.33) and 4.15 (SD =.19), respectively. Then the test items were constructed by typing each word in hiragana letters with one letter being deleted. The location at which the letter was deleted was randomly determined. As a pretest, the test items printed on a sheet of paper were presented to 36 undergraduates (18 male and 18 female) under the sole instruction to fill in each blank with one letter to form a word. The location of the blank in a letter string was changed if that string had elicited plural correct responses. The revised friendly and neutral letter strings (e.g., ) were used for the word fragment completion task in Experiment 2. Procedure. The procedure was almost the same as in Experiment 1 except that a wordfragment completion task was administered instead of an impression-formation task. The subjects were engaged in one of the three mood-induction tasks preceded by two filler tasks. After the mood induction procedure, all of the subjects participated in the wordfragment completion task. The subjects were presented with 30 friendly and 30 neutral word fragments typed on a sheet of paper and asked to fill in the blanks to form as many words as

9 28 T. Ikegami possible within 90 s. The word fragments were arranged in an array of 4 15 lines in such a manner that friendly and neutral word fragments appeared by turns. The mood state and the self-esteem state of all of the subjects were assessed immediately after the mood-induction procedure and also at the end of the experimental session, as was done in Experiment 1. The session took approximately 20 min. Results Because no significant sex differences were observed in a preliminary analysis, the data of the males and females were analyzed jointly, as in Experiment 1. Mood manipulation checks. Mood positivity scores for the first mood rating and second mood rating in each mood condition were submitted to a two-way analysis of variance, with the mood condition as a between-subjects factor and the time of rating as a within-subject factor. As a consequence, the main effect due to the mood condition was significant (F(2,76) = 26.64, p <.001), and so the scores were subjected to multiple comparison tests using Fisher s least significant difference method. It was shown that the score of the self-referent condition (M = 5.44, SD = 3.11) and that of the other-referent condition (M = 6.38, SD = 3.66) were significantly higher at p <.05 than that of the control condition (M = 0.78, SD = 1.58). The difference between the self-referent and other-referent conditions was not significant. Additionally, neither the main effect of the time of rating nor the interactional effect of the mood condition and time of rating was significant (F (1,76) < 1; F(2,76) < 1, respectively). This confirmed that the self-referent procedure versus other-referent mood induction procedure successfully elicited equivalent degrees of positive moods for the subjects included in the analysis. It also confirmed that the induced mood state was unchanged till the end of the experimental session in each of the three mood conditions. In order to compare the subjects mood states in Experiment 2 with those in Experiment 1, the mood positivity scores were submitted to a three-way analysis of variance with the experiment group as a first betweensubjects factor, the mood condition as a second between-subjects factor, and the time of rating as a within-subject factor. As a result, the effect due to the mood condition was shown to be significant (F(2,162) = 49.84, p <.001), but none of the other main and interactional effects was shown to be significant. This indicated that there should have been no substantial differences in the mood states between the groups of subjects from Experiments 1 and 2 for each mood condition. Self-esteem state. As in Experiment 1, the total self-esteem scores were submitted to a two-way analysis of variance with the mood condition as a between-subjects factor and the time of rating as a within-subject factor. The main effect due to the mood condition was significant (F(2,76) = 9.36, p <.001). Fisher s least significant difference test revealed that the score of the state self-esteem of the selfreferent condition (M = 65.70, SD = 6.13) was significantly higher at p <.05 than those of the other-referent condition (M = 55.58, SD = 10.96) and the control condition (M = 57.06, SD = 10.35). The difference between the latter two was not significant. As in Experiment 1, the effect of the time of rating was significant (F(1,76) = 5.28, p <.05), indicating a slight increase in the score from the first rating to the second rating, but the interaction between the mood condition and time of rating was not significant (F(2,76) < 1). One might therefore conclude that only the self-referent mood induction procedure had a substantial effect on the state self-esteem and that the produced differences in the levels of self-esteem across the mood conditions continued to exist constantly till the end of the experimental session. In order to compare the self-esteem scores of Experiment 2 with those of Experiment 1, the self-esteem scores were submitted to a three-way analysis of variance with the experiment group as a first between-subjects factor, the mood condition as a second betweensubjects factor, and the time of rating as a within-subject factor. It was shown that the main effects of the mood condition and time of

10 Self-esteem and positive mood effects 29 Table 2. Mean number of friendly and neutral words correctly completed as a function of the mood induction condition in Experiment 2 Word Type Positive Self-Referent (N = 28) Condition Positive Other-Referent (N = 26) Control (N = 25) Friendly a (3.66) a (3.72) b (3.19) Neutral c (4.54) c (3.58) c (2.89) Means in the same row or in the same column that do not share subscripts differ at p <.05 in Fisher s least significant difference test. Numerical values in parentheses indicate standard deviations. rating were significant (F(2,162) = 18.68, p <.001; F(1,162) = 10.30, p <.01, respectively), but the main effect of the experiment group and any of the interactional effects were not significant at all. Therefore, it could be confirmed that there should have been no substantial differences in the self-esteem states between the groups of subjects from Experiments 1 and 2 for any of the three mood conditions. Word fragment completion task. Responses were coded with respect to the number of correct word completions for two word types (friendly vs. neutral) across the three mood conditions (positive self-referent, positive otherreferent, and control). Table 2 shows mean numbers of friendly and neutral word completions for each mood condition. Word completion scores were analyzed in a two-way analysis of variance with the mood condition as a between-subjects factor and the word type as a within-subject factor. As a result, the main effect due to the word type was significant (F(1,76) = , p <.01), indicating the overall tendency that the number of correct completions for friendly words was apparently smaller than for neutral words. The main effect due to the mood condition was significant (F(2,76) = 4.14, p <.05), and the interactional effect between the mood condition and word type was reliably significant (F(2,76) = 5.08, p <.01). Further analyses revealed that the simple effect of the mood condition was significant for friendly words (F(2,76) = 3.837, p <.05), but not significant for neutral words (F(2,76) = 1.03). Fisher s least significant difference test revealed that for friendly word completions, the subjects both in the self-referent and otherreferent conditions performed significantly better at p <.05 than those in the control condition. More importantly, it showed that the subjects in the other-referent condition performed no worse than those in the selfreferent condition. Because there were no significant condition-differences for the neutral words, the observed differences for the friendly word completions could not be ascribed to the differing verbal ability levels of the subjects assigned to each mood condition. For a further examination, the proportion of the number of friendly words correctly completed to the total number of correct responses was computed for each subject. A one-way analysis of variance on this score (angular transformation was done in this analysis) showed that the effect due to the mood condition was significant (F(2,76) = 8.53, p <.001). Fisher s least significant difference test indicated that the proportion s score of either of the self-referent condition (M =.451, SD =.054) or the other-referent condition (M =.456, SD =.036) was significantly higher at p <.05 than that of the control condition (M =.408, SD =.045). The difference between the former two was not significant. Discussion The data converged to suggest that the selfreferent task and the other-referent positive mood induction task were equally successful at

11 30 T. Ikegami activating friendly words and making them more accessible in memory. This means that, either in the self-referent task or in the otherreferent mood induction task, friendly trait constructs are mechanistically activated simply because they are congruent with the affective valence of the induced-mood. In other words, the spreading activation processes triggered by the mood occur in a very automatic and undifferentiated manner. One might argue that these primary mood-based processes are perhaps not influenced by the self-reference nature of mood inducing events. However, it is evident that the pattern of mood effects on the word fragment completion task in Experiment 2 differed from the pattern of effects on the impression formation task in Experiment 1. This difference cannot be attributed to the differences in moods or self-esteem states of the subjects who participated in each experiment, since there were no substantial differences in those scores across Experiments 1 and 2. General Discussion In previous studies by Ikegami (1991, 1993c, 1996), it was found that an induced positive mood can influence person impression differently according to the contents of the cognition accompanying a mood-eliciting experience. More specifically, a positive mood can produce more clear-cut assimilative effects on friendliness ratings for the target when the mood is elicited by evoking self-enhancing rather than other-enhancing thoughts. This pattern of results was basically replicated in the present study. The present study further investigated the underlying mechanisms and tested the hypothesis that a momentarily-enhanced selfesteem in a self-referent mood induction will lead subjects to be more friendly toward others and more motivated to use mood-primed friendly traits. The present results generally supported the hypothesis. The impression rating data from Experiment 1 showed that the effect of a positive mood on person impression can be observed in the self-referent condition but not in the otherreferent mood induction condition. This difference could not be ascribed to the difference in the intensity of the positive mood induced by the two different kinds of tasks, because it was ascertained that equal amounts of positive moods had been elicited across the two conditions. On the other hand, the analysis of the SSES data revealed that there was a clear difference in the self-esteem state between the self-referent condition and other-referent condition. The level of the subjects self-esteem was significantly higher in the former relative to the latter condition. Furthermore, the word completion data from Experiment 2 showed that friendly trait concepts had been activated to the same extent across the self-referent condition versus other-referent mood condition. Taken together, these results suggested that even though universal mood-priming effects can be demonstrated at the trait activation level, these effects become more context-specific when it comes to impression formation judgments. In other words, the subjects were more likely to be motivated in using moodprimed friendly traits in the impression formation task when their self-esteem was temporarily enhanced by the mood-altering event. This was probably because the enhanced self-esteem possibly allowed an extroverted orientation and an active social engagement as formulated by Sedikides (1992a,b), leading to the increased motivation to view others as friendly. Accordingly, one may conclude that the state selfesteem plays a certain role in producing positive mood effects on person impression. An increased activation level of friendly traits caused by one s mood per se does not necessarily lead to favorable judgments of others, as postulated by the mood-priming model. The above argument does not seem at odds with literature on self-esteem. As we have mentioned in the introduction, literature on self-esteem have suggested that high selfesteem at a trait level will relate to friendly relationships with others (e.g. Baumeister, 1998). The present study has shown that momentarilyenhanced self-esteem will also promote friendly attitudes toward others. Further discussions are needed on whether enhanced self-esteem

12 Self-esteem and positive mood effects 31 will lead to higher friendliness ratings without the activation of relevant traits caused by one s mood per se. This issue may well be left to future studies because the primary concern here is to examine the joint operation of self-esteem and mood per se and to show the limitations of the mood-priming model and also the accessibility theory. The current results are inconsistent with the presumption of the accessibility theory that people will unconditionally use the trait concepts currently the most accessible when interpreting behavioral events (Higgins, & King, 1981; Wyer, & Srull, 1981). They may, however, correspond well with the recent theoretical speculations on knowledge activation and knowledge use by Higgins (1996). He contends that it is important to distinguish between the activation and use of knowledge because there are some variables (e.g. appropriateness of activated concepts, motivation to use or disuse activated-concepts) that influence knowledge use beyond those involved in knowledge activation. The present study suggests that the state self-esteem could be one of those mediating variables under certain circumstances. It must be noted, however, that there are some limitations and unsettled questions in the present study. Most important is that, since the present study focuses on mood effects on cognitive processes in impression formation, we should confine the present findings to perceptual levels. It is also noteworthy that the effects of self-referent mood inductions did not emerge on competence ratings. This fact seemingly suggests that enhanced self-esteem will come to play a critical role only in friendliness ratings, but further considerations are necessary. First, since the descriptions of the target person used in the present study contained little information regarding competence, one might argue that effects did not emerge on competence ratings because the material was irrelevant to this dimension. Second, one might also argue that enhanced self-esteem can make subjects view others favorably, but at the same time, view themselves as superior. It is probable that these two effects counteract each other, leading to no effects on the competence dimension. In any case, further investigations are needed to resolve this interpretive ambiguity. In addition, we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that other factors besides self-esteem might be relevant to the phenomenon. For instance, it remains unclear as to why the subjects did not use mood-primed traits under the other-referent mood induction condition. Little is known concerning the precise mechanisms that operate under that condition. The validity of the selfreported mood measures is still open to question. In the present paradigm, the subjects seemed susceptible to demand characteristics. More specifically, the subjects in the self-referent and other-referent mood induction conditions could have rated their own mood states positively simply because they were asked to describe themselves or others in positive terms in the previous sentence completion task. More subtle and unobtrusive mood measures will be needed in future studies. In addition, the reliability and validity of the Japanese version of SSES has to be strengthened. From the current results in particular, it was unclear why the self-esteem score increased from the first rating session to the second rating session in both Experiments 1 and 2. As we have seen above, there are a number of shortcomings and unsolved problems; nevertheless, these factors do not necessarily diminish the significance of the present findings. The main contribution of the present study is that the processes in which one s mood may influence cognition are shown to be more complicated than the mood-priming model postulated. Recently, it has widely been known that the degree and quality of mood priming effects can vary depending on various kinds of contextual and individual factors, such as the nature of the dependent variable, the type of processing strategy, and the subjects motivation to control their moodbased responses. Some researchers have been attempting to provide a comprehensive explanatory framework for such complexities of affect-cognition interplay (e.g. Forgas, 1995, 1999). Relatively little attention, however, has been given to the mental associations and

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