ABSTRACT
The present chapter examines the role of mood in determining how people seek and process information about themselves. We argue that positive mood may serve as a resource for achieving accurate self-assessment or as a goal in and of itself. As a resource, positive mood leads people to seek and process positive as well as negative information about themselves. As a goal, positive mood leads people to focus on positive information about themselves. Whether positive mood serves as a resource or as a goal depends on the value of the information. When the information is highly
diagnostic of an important self-attribute, mood serves as a resource, but when the information is of low diagnostic value or when it pertains to an unimportant self-attribute, positive mood serves as a goal. We describe a series of studies designed to test these ideas. These studies demonstrate that positive mood leads people to seek negative self-relevant feedback when this feedback has high informational value, but not when the feedback has low informational value. The first set of studies examines search of abilityrelated information, whereas the second set of studies examines processing of health-related information.
