Mood and Threat to Attitudinal Freedom: Delineating the Role of Mood Congruency and Hedonic Contingency in Counterattitudinal Message Processing

The present research examined when happy individuals' processing of a counterattitudinal message is guided by mood-congruent expectancies versus hedonic considerations. recipients in positive,neutral,or negative mood read a strong or weak counterattitudinal message which either contained a threat to attitudinal freedom or did not contain such a threat. as expected,a freedom-threatening counterattitudinal message was more mood threatening than a counterattitudinal message not threatening freedom. furthermore,as predicted by the mood-congruent expectancies approach,people in positive mood processed a nonthreatening counterattitudinal message more thoroughly than people in negative mood. message processing in neutral mood lay in between. in contrast,as predicted by the hedonic-contingency view,a threatening counterattitudinal message was processed less thoroughly in positive mood than in neutral mood. in negative mood,processing of a threatening counterattitudinal message was as low as in positive mood. these findings suggest that message processing is determined by mood congruency unless hedonic considerations override expectancy-based processing inclinations. © 2013 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.