In addition to providing information that can serve as a basis of judgment, feelings
influence how people process information, that is, their processing style. A number of different
explanations have been offered for this observation, usually highlighting the role of one specific
type of feeling (for reviews see Schwarz & Clore, 2007, and the contributions in Martin & Clore,
2001). Feelings-as-information theory provides a unified conceptualization of these influences in
the context of a situated cognition framework (Smith & Semin, 2004). It assumes that human
cognition stands in the service of action (James, 1890) and that our cognitive processes are
responsive to the environment in which we pursue our goals. This responsiveness ranges from the
higher accessibility of knowledge relevant to the current situation (e.g., Yeh & Barsalou, 2006) to
the choice of processing strategies that meet situational requirements (e.g., Wegner & Vallacher,
1986). When things go smoothly and we face no hurdles in the pursuit of our goals, we are likely to
rely on our pre-existing knowledge structures and routines, which served us well in the past.
Moreover, we may be willing to take some risk in exploring novel solutions. Once things go wrong,
we abandon reliance on our usual routines and focus on the specifics at hand to determine what
went wrong and what can be done about it. [...]
The theory further predicts that feelings or environmental cues that signal a
“problematic” situation foster an analytic, bottom-up processing style with considerable attention
to details, whereas feelings or environmental cues that signal a “benign” situation allow for a less
effortful, top-down processing style and the exploration of novel (and potentially risky) solutions
(Schwarz, 1990, 2002). This does not imply that people in a happy mood, for example, are
unable or unwilling to engage in analytic processing (in contrast to what an earlier version of the
theory suggested; Schwarz & Bless, 1991). Instead, it merely implies that happy feelings (and
other “benign” signals) do not convey a need to do so; when task demands or current goals
require bottom-up processing, happy individuals are able and willing to engage in it. A study
that addressed the influence of moods on people’s reliance on scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977)
illustrates this point.
Employing a dual-task paradigm, Bless, Clore, et al. (1996) had participants listen to a
tape-recorded restaurant story that contained script consistent and script inconsistent information.
While listening to the story, participants also worked on a concentration test that required detailoriented
processing; in contrast, the restaurant story could be understood by engaging either in
script-driven top-down processing or in data-driven bottom-up processing. Happy participants
relied on the script, as indicated by the classic pattern of schema guided memory: they were
likely to recognize previously heard script-inconsistent information, but also showed high rates
of intrusion errors in form of erroneous recognition of script-consistent information. Neither of
these effects was obtained for sad participants, indicating that they were less likely to draw on
the script to begin with. Given that top-down processing is less taxing than bottom-up
processing, we may further expect that happy participants’ reliance on the script allows them to
do better on a secondary task. Confirming this prediction, happy participants outperformed sad
participants on the concentration test. In combination, these findings indicate that moods influence
the spontaneously adopted processing style under conditions where different processing styles are
compatible with the individual’s goals and task demands, as was the case for comprehending the
restaurant story. Under these conditions, sad individuals are likely to spontaneously adopt a
systematic, bottom-up strategy, whereas happy individuals rely on a less effortful top-down
strategy. But when task demands (like a concentration test) or explicit instructions (e.g., Bless et al.,1990) require detail-oriented processing, happy individuals are able and willing to engage in the
effort.
Numerous findings pertaining to a broad range of feelings (from moods and emotions to
bodily experiences and processing fluency) and cognitive tasks (from creative and analytic problem
solving to persuasion and stereotyping) are consistent with the predictions of feelings-asinformation
theory (for reviews see Schwarz, 2002; Schwarz & Clore, 2007).
This would seem to be supported by the fact that sad moods make us process information more analytically.