The Influence of Depressed and Elated Mood on Deductive and Inductive Reasoning

Depressed and elated mood states may produce distinct information processing styles that can affect performance on deductive and inductive reasoning tasks differentially. Seventy-two undergraduates were asked to view a set of two film clips designed to induce either elated, neutral or depressed moods. One clip preceded each of two reasoning tasks, a deduction task and an induction task. We predicted that subjects in a depressed mood would exhibit impoverished performance relative to the other two conditions on the inductive reasoning problems but enhanced performance on those that involved deductive reasoning. Conversely, we expected subjects in an elated mood to perform worse than those in depressed and neutral moods on the deductive reasoning task, but better on the inductive reasoning task. Response times provided partial support for these hypotheses. Subjects in the elated mood condition performed significantly slower than those in both the neutral and depressed conditions on deductive reasoning problems, whereas subjects in the depressed mood condition performed significantly slower than those in the neutral condition on inductive reasoning problems. Implications for understanding mood-influenced cognitive styles are discussed.