Mood, Awareness, and Product Evaluation

This study investigated the effects of mood on product evaluation. Subjects were asked to evaluate the stereo speakers on which they heard music that induced either a good or a bad mood. Subjects' awareness of the music as the source of their mood was manipulated to be high or low. The results of this 2 x 2 design suggested that under low source awareness, mood biased the evaluation of the speakers, in that subjects evaluated the speakers more favorably when in a good mood than in a bad mood. By contrast, under high source awareness there was no difference in speaker evaluations between those in a good or bad mood. A consideration of those in a good or bad mood suggested that it was only the former who were able to correct for the bias in their evaluations when made more aware of the source of their mood. These results suggested that even when motivated to attend to an outside stimulus and to evaluate it objectively, those in a bad mood may have a limited ability to do so.