Effects of Mood on Helping Behavior

1. Effects of Mood on Helping Behavior Alyse Craig and Jackie Martin

2. Topics of Interest • Daily interactions with people in different moods and why they treat others the way they do. • Can moods be easily altered?

3. Hypothesis We hypothesized that happy and sad participants will display higher levels of helping behavior than will angry participants.

4. Research on Happiness and Helping Behavior: A Meta-Analysis • Carlson, Charlin, and Miller (1988): happiness leads to increased helping behavior • Why? Want to maximize outcomes for self; positive reinforcement • effects of happiness on helping behavior are substantially moderated by other variables. • Example: happy people less likely to help if feel negative emotions (guilt, jealousy) for helping or view helping situation negatively

5. Research on Sadness and Helping Behavior: A Meta-Analysis • Carlson and Miller (1987): meta-analysis of three theories of how moderating variables interact with sadness to affect helping behavior

6. Research on Sadness and Helping Behavior • Negative-state relief (NSR) model: people are motivated to reduce their negative mood with positive reinforcement obtained from helping • cost-benefit analysis: is it worth it? • Attentional focus model: negative mood increases helpfulness only when the individual is focusing on the other in trouble • Focusing on the plight of others fosters empathy

7. Research on Sadness and Helping Behavior • Responsibility/Objective Self-Awareness Model: help when feeling responsible (guilt) and aware of self and of prominent social norms

8. Research on Sadness and Helping Behavior • Results support attentional focus and responsibility/objective self-awareness models, not NSR model • responsibility and attention to other increase helpfulness • objective self-awareness increases helping behavior when actively concerned about prosocial values • not a direct link, just a tendency

9. Research on Anger and Helping Behavior • Weiner • Examined the relations of causal attributions and emotion to judgments related to helping behavior. • Example: Did he fall because he was drunk or because he was physically handicapped? • And how does that make you feel? • Less help when the cause was internal to the actor and controllable, more when external and uncontrollable • Anger and no help VS. Sympathy and help

10. Participants • Sample size of 21 student participants from Hanover College and Southwestern. • 57 % female and 43 % male.  • 95 % Caucasian and 5 % Native American.

11. Materials • Four separate rooms: two for waiting and two for actual experiment • Four poems • Control: Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man” • Happy: Carryl’s “The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet” • Angry: Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” • Sad: Berryman’s “He Resigns”

12. Cupchik’s Emotion in Literature • Gave participants short stories that were emotionally detailed and obtained reader response ratings. • Responses to literature depend on subject matter • Don’t identify with situation: less responsive • Identify with situation: more responsive

13. “The Seven Ages of Man” All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players,They have their exits and entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages.

14. “The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet” And the Moral is this: Be it madam or miss To whom you have something to say, You are only absurd when you get in the curd But you're rude when you get in the whey.

15. “Traveling Through the Dark” My fingers touching [the dead doe’s] side brought me the reason—her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,alive, still, never to be born.Beside that mountain road I hesitated. I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,then pushed her over the edge into the river. • Issue with this particular scenario is that not everyone reading will see as an injustice.

16. “He Resigns” Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts.Her having gone awayin spirit from me. Hostsof regrets come & find me empty. I don't feel this will change.I don't want any thingor person, familiar or strange.I don't think I will singany more just now;ever. I must startto sit with a blind browabove an empty heart.

17. Questionnaire • A 15-item questionnaire designed to measure participants’ moods after reading a poem. • 5 question items each for happiness, sadness, and anger • Participants rated their moods on a seven point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” • Example: This poem made me feel elated.

18. Procedure • Meeting room to get consent and inform • Take one at a time to one of the experiment rooms • Give poem to read • Confederate comes in with questionnaire, trips and falls, and drops his or her stack of papers • Participant’s response to helping situation documented • Given questionnaire • Once all participants complete experiment, debriefed as group in the debriefing room

19. Procedural Issue • The scenario is a bit transparent. • Some previous ideas • Sitting on desk and brushing stack of papers on to the floor • Ask participant to aid researcher in gathering data

20. Reiterating the Hypothesis We hypothesized that happy and sad participants will display higher levels of helping behavior than will angry participants.

21. What We Found • Manipulation check: Happy participants were happier than other three groups • No significant difference in other moods • Happy and angry participants acted as expected, but sad participants helped less than we hypothesized. • As a side note, every group helped a little less than what we would have hoped.

22. A Light in the Dark • One participant out of 21 participants actually got up to help the confederate pick up his or her papers. • This particular participant was in the sad condition.

23. One-way ANOVA A one-way ANOVA was used to test for differences in mood and helping behavior across the four conditions.

24. One-way ANOVA Comparing Happiness • Manipulation check Significant difference in happiness between the happy condition as compared to the three other conditions, p < .001 • Tukey post hoc comparisons • happy condition (M = 3.8) • control condition (M = 3.2) • sad condition (M = 1.4) • angry condition (M = 1.1)

25. One-way ANOVAComparing Sadness • Manipulation check No significant difference in sadness among the four mood groups, p = .24 • Tukey post hoc comparisons • sad condition (M = 4.1) • angry condition (M = 3.3) • control condition (M = 2.8) • happy condition (M = 2.4)

26. One-way ANOVAComparing Anger • Manipulation check No significant difference in anger among the four mood groups, p = .53 • Tukey post hoc comparisons • angry condition (M = 1.7) • happy condition (M = 1.9) • sad condition (M = 2.2) • control condition (M = 2.5)

27. One-way ANOVAComparing Helping Behavior • Hypothesis No significant difference in helping behavior among the four mood groups, p = .997 • Tukey post hoc comparisons revealed that there was no difference in helping behavior among the • control condition (M = 1.4) • happy condition (M = 1.4) • angry condition (M = 1.4) • sad condition (M = 1.3)

28. Mood and Helping Behavior

29. Some Interpretations • One-way ANOVA comparing responses to the helping situation for the four mood groups partially supported our hypothesis • However, the results revealed that sad participants were less likely to help than was originally hypothesized.

30. Limitations • Poetry by nature conveys many emotions • Angry poem not angry enough? Depends on views of injustice. • Does Shakespeare intimidate people?

31. Limitations: The Confederate • Some participants were familiar with confederate. • Substitute confederate mentioned to participant that he or she was not allowed to interact with participant.

32. Limitations: Taking the Fall • Location of the fall relative to participant and researcher • different for both confederates • Horrid acting skills?

33. Future Directions • A more satisfactory look at anger without relation to attribution • Weiner: Under what circumstances would you help? • Less obvious helping scenario