The effect of mental progression on mood.

There is ample evidence that mood influences what people think, as well as how they think. Mood is associated with increases in the amount of information accessible in memory and the diversity of this material (Isen et al., 1985). As moods improve, the lens through which people attend to information broadens in scope, increasing both their sensitivity to relations among remotely associated material in memory (Isen & Daubman, 1984) and the breadth of attention they employ when processing the external world (Clore et al., 1994; see Fredrickson, 1998). Clearly our mood affects the scope of our thinking but is this relationship reciprocal (see Bar, 2009)? The bi-directionality of this link is implied in several psychological literatures, yet few have measured the affective consequences of broad versus narrow information processing. We present evidence that mood is affected by the associative breadth of information processing and the presence or absence of mental progression. The possibility that processing scope affects mood is consistent with a host of clinical findings. For example, a hallmark feature of depression is a cyclical, ruminative thinking pattern, or an absence of associative breadth (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000). Importantly, evidence reveals that this thought “recycling” exacerbates negative moods, increasing both the length of depressive episodes (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1993) and the severity of depressive symptoms (Nolan et al., 1998; Roberts et al., 1998). Likewise, a telltale sign that someone is experiencing a manic episode is the presence of a “flight of ideas,” a continuous flow of speech that jumps from topic to topic, usually based on thin but discernable associations (Harvey et al., 1984; Henry et al., 1971; Richards & Kinney, 1990). This work raises the possibility that mood depends not just on the content of thought (Teasdale, 1977), but on the degree to which it covers mental ground. Substantiating the view that mood is affected by information processing is a wealth of evidence from research on processing fluency. The results of several studies converge on the finding that effortless, speeded processing of information is hedonically pleasurable (Schwarz et al., 1991; Schwarz & Clore, 1996; Winkielman et al., 2003; for review see Clore, 1992). Targets that are preceded by conceptually related information or embedded in congruent contexts elicit more positive affect than targets that are preceded by irrelevant information or embedded in incongruous contexts (Kelley & Jacoby, 1998; Whittlesea, 1993). Although processing ease is a critical determinant of fluency, whether manipulations that increase efficiency (e.g., conceptual singularity) continue to induce pleasure over extended periods of information processing is debatable. For example, in recent work Pronin & Jacobs (2008) demonstrate that invariable processing – reading the same sentence 21 times – diminishes positive affect. This raises the possibility that processing ease is a necessary but not sufficient condition for pleasurable thinking. The effect of processing ease on mood might critically depend on the degree to which one’s thinking seems to “go somewhere”. The view that progress affects mood is further bolstered by research on wellbeing. Several scholars argue that perceived progress in the pursuit of a personally meaningful goal is a critical determinant of happiness (Brunstein, 1993; Emmons, 1996). Our argument is that mood is also affected by progress of the mental variety. We propose that progress in this medium can emerge in the absence of a meaningful personal goal. Thinking which advances across concepts in a conceptually coherent way feels progressive, while thinking that is restricted to a single concept feels stagnant. For this reason, the associative breadth of information processing should affect mood. Whereas previous considerations of the effect of extended information processing on mood have focused on repetition (Pronin & Jacobs, 2008), we measured participants’ mood after they processed word lists with narrowly constrained associative relations and after they processed word lists with expansively progressing associative relations (Experiment 1). As predicted, participants’ mood was relatively better after periods of broad versus constrained processing. Experiment 2 ruled out the possibility that conceptual plurality alone accounted for these mood differences; results converge with the view that mood is affected by the presence or absence of mental progression.