Feeling and Doing: Affective Influences on Interpersonal Behavior

It is a nice sunny day, you are in a good mood, and you are on your way to ask your boss for a pay rise. What will you say? How will you formulate your request, and what sorts of negotiating strategies will you employ in pursuing your objective? More generally, how does temporary mood influence the kind of interpersonal strategies people adopt in such social encounters? This article is about the role of affect in the way people think and act in strategic social situations. Although most of us are intuitively aware that our feelings can have a profound influence on our thoughts, judgments, and interpersonal behaviors, we do not yet fully understand how and why these influences occur. Numerous recent studies found that affect plays an important role in social cognition and judgments (Baron, 1987; Forgas, 2000b; Martin & Clore, 2001; Sedikides, 1995; Sinclair & Mark, 1995; Zajonc, 2000). However, the influence of affective states on how people plan and execute real, strategic interpersonal behaviors has received comparatively little attention, except perhaps in the area of helping and altruism (Salovey & Rosenhan, 1989; Schaller & Cialdini,1990). This article redresses this imbalance by presenting an integrative review of past and present ideas about the role of affect in interpersonal behavior. The article also offers a theoretical explanation of these effects, emphasizing the moderating role of different information-processing strategies, and summarizes the results of a series of programmatic experiments dealing with this topic. The issues covered here should be of direct interest not only to social psychologists but also to cognitive, clinical, developmental and organizational psychologists—in fact, to scholars in any discipline where the relation between affect and social behavior is of importance. Understanding when, how, and why affect influences strategic social behavior requires a careful analysis of the information-processing strategies that produce these effects. Different information-processing strategies may promote, inhibit, or even reverse affective influences on cognition and behavior. Depending on the kind of processing strategies used, researchers may thus observe affect congruence or incongruence, or perhaps no affective influences at all on how people construe and respond to social situations (Forgas, 1995a). In addition, affective states themselves have an important but subtle influence on the kind of information-processing strategies people adopt in various social situations and ultimately on their interpersonal behaviors. The article begins with a brief discussion of historical ideas about the relations among affect, thinking, and behavior, and early psychological explanations based on psychodynamic and conditioning theories are considered. Next, contemporary affect–cognition theories are reviewed, and a multiprocess approach to explaining the existing evidence is outlined. In the second half of the article, I review my recent empirical research demonstrating the systematic influence of affective states on a variety of interactive behaviors. These experiments show that affect can significantly influence the way people interact with each other, the way they formulate and respond to interpersonal requests, the way they plan and execute bargaining and negotiating strategies, and the way they produce and use persuasive messages. Throughout, an integrative explanation of these findings is advocated, emphasizing the role of different information-processing strategies in moderating these effects.