AbstractsPsychology

The present research examines the influence of people?s moods on anticipated audience impressions. In Study 1, participants received bogus positive, negative, or no feedback about their performance on a task and predicted a hypothetical audience's impressions of them in several social scenarios. Although participants' moods were successfully altered by the feedback manipulation, anticipated impressions did not differ between the three feedback conditions. In Study 2, participants wrote about a sad or a happy news story prior to estimating how an audience might judge their performance on a novel test. Writing about a sad news story led to less favorable anticipated impressions and opinions about own performance than did writing about a happy news story.