Mood and the reliance on the ease of retrieval heuristic

Four studies investigate the relationship between individuals´ affective states and their reliance on the ease of retrieval heuristic. Based on prior research, we created conditions that allowed to disentangle whether individuals based their judgments on the ease with which the retrieved information came to mind or on the activated content per se. The results consistently show that happy participants were more likely to rely on the ease of retrieval heuristic, whereas sad participants were more likely to rely on the activated content. Additional analyses indicate that this pattern is not due to a differential recall of happy versus sad participants (Experiment 2), and that happy participants no longer relied on the ease of retrieval when the diagnosticity of this information was called into question (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 shows that relying on the ease of retrieval heuristic resulted in faster judgments than relying on content, with the former but not the latter being a function of the amount of activated information. The results are in line with recent models on affect and cognition suggesting that happy mood increases the reliance on heuristics and general knowledge structures.