Thus, action must be taken to rectify the situation. In order to act appropriately, one must first perform more detailed information processing with the goal of determining what sort of action to take. Regardless of whether the emotion is positive or negative, however, the emotion has processing implications informing the individual about what to do. This explanation of emotions is called cognitive tuning . Cognitive tuning suggests that the appropriate cognitive processing is cued by the present affective state.
Positive affect signals that a situation is benign, whereas negative affect indicates a problem.
As a result, people rely on general, heuristic processing in positive moods, while negative moods trigger more detailed, systematic processing. Thus, cognitive tuning suggests that positive emotions are cues that everything is fine, and negative emotions serve as problem representations. Therefore, negative emotions should lead to actions to try and correct the problem, and positive emotions need not lead to any action. Also, cognitive tuning suggests that positive affect focuses people on internal, subjective data, cuing the use of heuristic processing, while negative affect focuses people on external, objective data, cuing systematic processing. Subjects were either in happy or sad moods, and they were either told to name birds until they had enough, or until they didn't want to produce any more names.