Abstract
With Navon stimuli that differ in visual angle, we examine the hypothesis that a negative mood focuses the observer's attention on small and local features of these stimuli and a positive mood focuses attention on large and global features. Before and after manipulating mood by either listening to music or looking at a picture book, each of the 72 participants was asked about which local or global feature of each stimulus they perceived more clearly and gave the strongest impression. We found that the larger the size of the stimulus, the more participants tended to response to a local feature. From the numbers of local responses, we determined a threshold size at which responses to global features exceeded the number of responses to local features. The results indicate that the mean threshold was lower under the negative mood condition, but unchanged in the positive mood condition. On the basis of these findings, we argue that that the effect of positive mood is not stable, but rather emerges when the global features are related to the positive affective value or are higher accessible, whereas the effect of the negative mood does not depend on such relations.
