Two experiments employed image-based tasks to test the hypothesis that happier moods promote a greater focus on the forest and sadder moods a greater focus on the trees. The hypothesis was based on the idea that in task situations, affective cues may be experienced as task-relevant information, which then influences global versus local attention. Using a serial-reproduction paradigm, Experiment 1 showed that individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to use an accessible global concept to guide attempts to reproduce a drawing from memory. Experiment 2 investigated the same hypothesis by assessing the use of global and local attributes to classify geometricfigures. As predicted, individuals in sad moods were less likely than those in happier moods to classify figures on the basis of globalfeatures.

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Three experiments investigated how trait anxiety would influence individuals' assumptions about the relevance of their experiences of state anxiety for judgments of risk. Experiment 1 found that attributions of state anxiety to a judgment-irrelevant source reduced the risk estimates of low, but not of high, trait-anxious individuals. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that attribution manipulations reduce the influence of state affect on judgment only when the state affect is inconsistent with participants' trait affect. Experiment 3 revealed that these effects can be controlled by explicitly manipulating participants' assumptions about the relevance of their feelings. Regardless of the level of trait anxiety, attributions were effective at reducing mood effects when facts, but not feelings, were assumed to be the relevant basis for judgment. Overall, the results suggest that trait-consistent affect is more readily assumed to be informative and hence is more likely to be relied on than trait-inconsistent affect.

Two experiments investigated how individual differences in attention to emotion influence the role of affect in judgments of risk. In Experiment 1, mood influenced the judgments of individuals high, but not low, in attention to emotion. When an attribution manipulation made a cause of their feelings salient, individuals high in emotional attention no longer perceived their feelings as relevant and were not influenced by them; whereas those low in emotional attention now paid attention to them and were influenced by them. This manipulation had these effects when it was presented prior to, but not in the middle of, a series of judgments. In Experiment 2, differences in response to the attribution manipulation disappeared when participants perceptions of the relevance of their feelings were governed by instructions to use either feelings or facts as a basis for judgment. The results suggest that feelings influence judgment when they seem relevant.

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