The authors examined the role of intrinsic interest in mediating the relationship among mood, processing goals, and task performance. Participants in induced happy, neutral, or sad moods generated similarities and differences between TV shows using performance-based, enjoyment-based, or no stop rule (cf. L.L. Martin, D.W. Ward, J.W. Achee, & R.S. Wyer, 1993). Pretask interest and both quantitative (time spent, number generated) and qualitative (creativity) performance were assessed. Happy participants spent more time and generated more items than other participants when using an enjoyment-based stop rule but spent less time and generated fewer items when using a performance-based stop rule. Happy participants also expressed greater pretask interest and were more creative than other participants regardless of stop rule. Regression-based path analyses indicated that pretask interest partially mediated the effects of mood on quantitative performance but not on creativity.

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Previous research has found that people in positive moods perform better than others on creativity and divergent thinking tasks but perform more poorly and/or process the available information less thoroughly on many other cognitive tasks. The present experiment examined various hypotheses concerning the process mediating the latter effect. Positive mood subjects performed significantly worse on a set of syllogisms than control subjects, even though they had ample timefor the task. Positive mood subjects were also significantly more likely than controls to select an unqualified conclusion, tended to take less time on the task, tended to diagram the relationships depicted by the premises less frequently, and tended to give more answers consistent with the atmosphere heuristic. Together; these findings argue against distraction accounts of the influence of positive affect. The results are most consistent with accounts arguing that people in positive moods expend less effort.

Increasingly, agencies supporting community health promotion interventions require participating communities and evaluators to specify how the intervention will be maintained once agency funding ends. The Stanford Five-City Project (FCP) implemented two different strategies to maintain its heart disease education program, with the second strategy designed to overcome the barriers to implementation that were encountered by the first. This paper provides a practice-oriented description of the initial 'community network' maintenance strategy of the FCP, the barriers that were encountered as this network strategy was implemented, the alternative 'capacity-building' strategy directed at local health educators and the successful implementation of this alternative. Also discussed are the community organization issues underlying the shift in intervention maintenance strategies and the specific components of the capacity-building strategy, including its focus on health educators, and its application of a training of trainers model and cooperative learning methods to provide professional development, technical assistance and other resources to a target group of community health educators. Our experience indicates that capacity-building is a viable method for intervention maintenance and that it may also facilitate efforts to disseminate model health promotion programs to communities lacking experience in community health promotion intervention.

Ss watched a videotaped nonpolitical speech by a male political candidate that conveyed either a favorable or an unfavorable image. Then they heard an excerpt of a radio program in which the candidate was described as holding either conservative positions or liberal positions on a series of specific issues. The impact of the candidate's speech on evaluations of him decreased over time. However, Ss used the speech as a basis for judgment only when the candidate's issue stands had unfavorable implications. When Ss learned the candidate's issue stands 24 hr after they heard the speech, they based their evaluations on their personal agreement with these stands. When Ss learned the candidate's issue positions immediately after the speech, however, they based their evaluations on the ideological implications of the issue stands instead.