Jones, E. 1 & Norman, E. 1, 2
1 University of Bergen
2 Haukeland University Hospital
According to the mood-as-information model (Schwartz & Clore, 2003) a sad mood may facilitate a systematic processing style involving increased attention to detail. We apply this model to implicit learning in order to investigate whether the implicit system will use a negative mood to indicate it needs to learn more. Healthy participants (N=80) were trained on a serial reaction time (SRT) task where the target stimulus was always a picture of a human face. For participants in the sad mood condition, the target stimulus was always a sad face. For participants in the happy mood condition it was always a happy face. Mood was assessed with PANAS-X (Watson & Clark, 1994). RSI was either 0 or 500 ms. There was a significant interaction between mood and RSI on the amount of learning: At RSI-500 there was a trend for sad participants to show more learning than happy participants. At RSI-0 there was no effect of mood on learning. We discuss the results in relationship to the mood-as-information model, and relate our findings to a recent study by von Helversen et al. (2011). The clinical implications of our findings are also discussed.