Effects of mood induction on reasoning

Previous research has found contradictory results related to the effects of mood on cognitive functioning. Mood states have been found to be associated with increased creativity, coping skills, adaptive reasoning, and cognitive processing strategies that benefit task performance. However, mood states have also been found to impair cognitive performance by reducing working memory resources and causing more task-irrelevant thoughts resulting in diminished working memory, attention, decision making, and reasoning abilities required by certain executive tasks. The aim of this study was to examine how different mood states following mood induction procedures affect complex reasoning. Ninety-five participants were included in the analyses of the current study. They were randomly assigned to one of the three mood states that were induced by using positive, negative, or neutral video clips obtained from the internet. Reasoning performance was measured by counting errors and completion times of Booklet Category Test performance after the mood induction procedure. Results revealed that only small changes in mood states were induced through the videos.