Role of Familiarity in Mediating the Impact of Positive Affect on Persuasive Processing

心情积极的人比心情不积极的人处理信息的批判性和深度更少。因此，快乐的人有时更容易被软弱和似是而非的论点所说服。尽管这一发现本身已得到充分证实，但对其的解释却并非如此。另一个公认的发现是，对熟悉的物体、事件或情况的认识既能激发积极情绪，也能激发非分析性思维。感觉积极是对熟悉的暗示。把这两组发现放在一起，表明积极情绪触发非分析性思维，因为快乐通常表明熟悉，当熟悉的东西，它可以表面处理。本研究的主要目的是通过经验证明积极情绪会触发非分析性思维，因为积极情绪通常意味着熟悉，而熟悉又会触发非分析性思维。在这一观点中，人们经常把各种环境小事件（如收到赞美、收到意想不到的小礼物、看一部有趣的电影）引起的温和的积极情绪误认为是伴随着熟悉感的积极情绪。这些实验旨在表明：a)这种困惑可能发生，b)这种困惑发生和不发生的条件，以及c)这种困惑是通常发现的感觉良好和非分析性处理之间的联系的原因。考虑到积极的情绪很容易被触发，要么是偶然的（比如人们在听总统演讲之前看电视喜剧），要么是故意的（比如广告公司在展示一种几乎没有什么有价值的产品时引用了一个幽默的语境），这项研究对理解人们何时以及如何更容易受到说服或更抗拒说服具有理论和实践意义。

People who are in positive moods deal with information less critically and in less depth than do those who are not in a positive mood. For this reason, happy people can sometimes be more easily persuaded by weak and specious arguments. Although the finding itself is well established, the explanation for it is not. Another well-established finding is that the recognition of an object, event, or situation as familiar triggers both a positive mood and non-analytic thinking. Feeling positive is a cue to familiarity. Putting these two sets of findings together, it is suggested that positive mood triggers non-analytic thinking because being happy usually signals familiarity, and when something is familiar, it can be dealt with superficially.The primary objective of this research is to empirically establish that positive mood triggers non-analytic thinking because positive mood usually signals familiarity, which in turn triggers non-analytic thinking. In this view, people often mistake a mild positive mood induced by all kinds of small environmental events (such as receiving a compliment, being given a small unexpected gift, watching a funny movie) for the positive mood that accompanies the recognition of familiarity. These experiments are designed to show a) that this confusion can take place, b) the conditions under which it does and does not take place, and c) that this confusion is responsible for the typically found association between feeling good and non-analytic processing. Given that positive moods can be triggered quite easily either incidentally (as when people watch a television comedy before listening to a Presidential address) or quite deliberately (as when an advertising agency invokes a humorous context in which to present a product with few valuable attributes), this research has both theoretical and practical implications for understanding when and how people can be more vulnerable, or more resistant to, persuasion.