The influence of mood on attribution.

Four studies show that mood systematically affects attributions of observed behavior by altering relative attention to actor and context. When the actor is more salient, sad people are more inclined to perceive an actor in stable trait terms and favor dispositional over situational explanations, whereas the opposite is true for happy people (Studies 1-3). However, when the context is made more salient, this pattern reverses, such that those in a negative mood make more situational attributions than those in a positive mood (Study 4). Taken together, these findings provide strong support for our hypothesis that mood and salience interact to affect attributions.