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Testing Involved Altering The Mood Of Participants With A Test

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His method of testing involved altering the mood of participants with a “test” of verbal abilities, and a subsequent attribution task to measure how affect influenced their perceptions. To alter participants’ moods, a sentence-completion test was used. The average completion score was at nineteen sentences, while the minimum completed by all was fourteen sentences. The “happy” group was told that answering seven to thirteen correctly was “average” and thirteen or higher constituted an “above average” score. The “sad” group was told that “average” was twenty-seven to thirty correct answers, meaning that they were below average. The control group was thanked and told that their answers would help refine the test and were dismissed.
In a post-exercise questionnaire for the “sad” and “happy” groups, the experimenters snuck in questions from other standard measures that assess a sad-happy scale and a bad-good scale to measure the effects of the manipulative feedback.
The next step was the “social perception” test which asked participants to read an essay from a student who was participating in a debate. Repeating the conditions of the 1967 experiment, they told the participants either that the student wrote it of their own free will, or they were forced to take that position for the purposes of the debate. The topic was one of saliency at the time for Australians, regarding French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The essays were not ambivalent, clearly stating a position

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