The Effect Of Positive Mood And Negative Mood On The Relationship Between Implicit And Explicit Attitudes

Attitude has always been an important topic of social psychology. From the available information home and abroad, the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes has been one of the hot topics in attitudes research field.Despite the enthusiastic search for moderators of implicit-explicit attitude correspondence, researchers investigating it have focused on aspects of the individual's personality or, more commonly, aspects of attitude object (Nosek, 2007). Researchers have ignored whether fluctuations in intrapersonal cues (e.g., fleeting affective states) shape the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes. In this research, we tested how different moods regulate implicit and explicit attitude correspondence in three experiments.In Experiment 1, we used Huntsinger and Smith (2009) experimental paradigm. Two MV were used to induce positive mood and negative mood. We tested the change of the implicit and explicit attitudes correspondence about mathematics and art in these two different moods, through analysing on the measure of implicit attitudes, the measure of explicit attitudes, mood manipulation check, and emotional awakening level check. The result did not find difference relationship between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes.On the base of Experiment 1, Experiment 2 had a more tightly control on the experiment. First, the procedure of the mood induction was improved, making the maximum response of the induced mood; second, select subjects who sensitive to musical emotion, in order to ensure an effective mood induction. And, the between-subject design was used in this experiment. We find that, participants in positive moods exhibited greater correspondence between implicit and explicit academic attitudes than did those in negative moods.We included a condition in which no mood was induced in the Experiment 3, to clear whether the observed differences in implicit-explicit attitudes correspondence resulted from positive mood enhancing or negative mood decreasing the relation between the two. In addition, we turned our focus on youth and old, which has a lower relationship than maths and arts. Results showed that, the participants no mood was induced had similar mood with those in positive mood induced, and the relationship between implicit-explicit attitudes was difference when the attitude object had been changed.From these three experiments, we concluded that:(1) the correspondence between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes was affected by moods. People in positive moods have a higher implicit-explicit attitudes correspondence than that in negative moods; (2) The effect of moods on the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes may also should be on the base of which the attitude object is.