Negative affect can increase or decrease message scrutiny: The affect interpretation hypothesis

Applying insights from the mood-as-information and mood-as-input models to persuasion, it was hypothesized that negative (vs. neutral) affect would increase or decrease message processing depending on how recipients interpret their affect. Recipients who are (vs. are not) likely to question the legitimacy of the message were predicted to process to a low (vs. high) extent when experiencing negative affect. High salience of a judgment-irrelevant cause for negative affect was predicted to render affect uninformative and hence discount its effects on processing. These hypotheses were supported in two experiments with 388 university students, in which the likelihood of questioning message legitimacy was operationalized as high versus low vested interest (smokers vs. nonsmokers reading an antismoking appeal; Experiment 1) or by providing versus not providing a cue to the communicator being propagandist (Experiment 2).