The experimental study of mood and affect requires the manipulation of mood experiences. There are some problems regarding the use of certain types of success and failure mood induction procedures and how they actually induce the desired mood. The authors hypothesized that success and failure in goal attainment would lead to desired differences in positive and negative affect. Results indicate that success in attaining a goal led to more positive affect and less negative affect, while failure in goal attainment resulted in less positive affect and more negative affect. These results demonstrate that goal-setting situations are viable ways to explore affective reactions and support success and failure in goal attainment as a method to induce desired moods.

This study investigated how people integrate base-rate information with information about the accuracy of a diagnostic test when making judgments about the probability a person will develop a disease. Participants were presented nine vignettes of medical cases with three base-rate levels crossed with three levels of the accuracy of the diagnostic test. Supporting our hypotheses, we found that both the base-rate and test-accuracy information influenced the probability judgments. Moreover, the test accuracy by base-rate interaction indicated that the influence of the accuracy of the test on judgments was conditioned by the level of the base-rate information. In contrast to previous research in which participants tended to neglect base-rate information in favor of case-specific information, this study demonstrates that if the baserate information is seen as relevant to the case, it can have considerable and even greater influence than case-specific information on judgments.R esearch suggests that when individuals make decisions about the likelihood of an event s occurrence there are often systematic biases in their decision processes (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982). One of the biases evident in previous judgment research is base-rate neglect (Koehler, 1996). Base-rate neglect is the tendency for individuals presented with an inference problem to exaggerate the importance of individuating or case-specific information and understate the importance of the baserate information when making judgments about the likelihood of an event occurring (Hinsz et al., 1988). Base-rates provide information about the frequency or likelihood of an event in a population (e.g., the proportion of individuals with a genetic predisposition to develop a specific disease). Case-specific information provides diagnostic information about conditions related to the occurrence of an event (e.g., a particular individual is tested and is found to have the genetic predisposition). A number of factors have been proposed to influence how case-specific and base-rate information are integrated when making predictions about the occurrence of events (e.g., how likely a particular person is to develop a specific disease). In this paper, the base-rate (i.e., one in four chances) and accuracy of a test related to a specific disease (i.e., test is more often right than wrong) are investigated to determine how they might individually, and in combination, influence judgments about the likelihood a person will develop a specific disease.

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