Trends in cognitive sciences
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Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. ⋯ Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.