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Positive Mood and Future-Oriented Self-Evaluation

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When individuals think about their future, feedback on their strengths and weaknesses may often serve as a useful source of information. Three studies investigated the influence of positive and neutral moods on feedback seeking. In Studies 1 and 2, positive mood increased interest in feedback about weaknesses when this information was useful for self-assessment and self-improvement. But when the feedback was not useful for these superordinate, long-term goals then positive mood directed participants’ interest to strength-focused feedback, thereby serving short-term, affective concerns (e.g., feeling good about oneself). Study 3 directly manipulated self-evaluative goals. When a learning goal was activated, positive mood increased interest in weaknesses-focused feedback, but when an affective goal was activated, positive mood increased interest in strength-focused feedback. These results support our hypothesis that positive mood attunes individuals to the relationships of goals and means, thus promoting actions that serve primary goals.

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Notes

  1. These items were selected based on pilot testing, using the following criteria: 1) they were judged to be believable skills on which people would seek feedback; 2) they were deemed plausible inter-personal or intra-personal skills, and; 3) pre-test participants thought it very possible that they possessed these weaknesses and strengths.

  2. These six items were selected based on pre-testing 20 possible items, using the following criteria: 1) they were judged to be believable aspects of social intelligence; 2) participants in the pretest believed them to be at least moderately important aspects of social intelligence; 3) pretest participants thought it very possible but not certain that they possessed both weaknesses and strengths in each area.

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Acknowledgments

Authorship on this article was determined alphabetically. We want to thank Ronni Michelle Greenwood for her comments on an earlier version of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Ben Gervey & Yaacov Trope

  2. Department of Psychology, Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Eric R. Igou

  3. Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Pl., New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Yaacov Trope

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  1. Ben Gervey
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  2. Eric R. Igou
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  3. Yaacov Trope
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Correspondence to Yaacov Trope.

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Gervey, B., Igou, E.R. & Trope, Y. Positive Mood and Future-Oriented Self-Evaluation. Motiv Emot 29, 267–294 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-006-9011-3

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