How good gets better and bad gets worse: Understanding the impact of affect on evaluations of known brands

Participants experiencing positive or negative affect judged products described by brand and attribute information. Four studies using parameter- estimation and reaction-time procedures determined whether the impact of affect on brand name was the result of its influence on ( a) participants' perception of its evaluative implications at the time of encoding or ( b) the importance they attached to it while integrating it with other information to compute a judgment. Results showed that positive affect increased the extremity of the brand's evaluative implications ( i. e., its scale value) rather than the importance ( or weight) that participants attached to it. A fifth experiment demonstrated the implications of these findings for product choices made 24 hours after affect was induced.