Positive Mood, Intuition, and the Effects of Approach-Avoidant Primes

Research has shown that individuals who describe themselves as highly intuitive (i.e., likely to trust their hunches or gut feelings in decision-making) react to stimuli as a function of positive mood.  For instance, when they are in a good mood, intuitive individuals say they understand a variety of ambiguous stimuli and show superior performance on an intuitive task (Hicks, et al., 2010).   Recent research has shown that intuitive individuals, especially in a good mood, are more susceptible to the effects of facial expressions on evaluative judgments (Trent, 2010).   This study examined the prediction that induced positive affect would interact with intuition to predict susceptibility to bodily primes of approach-avoidance motivation.  Results showed that the prime manipulation had no effect on these outcomes; however, performance on a line bisection task did show a significant mood induction condition X intuition interaction.  Regression analyses showed that in the positive mood condition, intuition was significantly related to hemispheric bias indicating heightened approach motivation.  In the neutral mood condition, intuition was not associated with this measure.  The pattern of this interaction is very much in keeping with results from past research showing that the interaction of positive affect and intuition predicts outcomes such as belief in UFO’s, ghosts, and  magical thinking (King et al., 2007) as well as performance on linguistic coherence judgments (Hicks et al., 2010).  Thus, these results might indicate that the influence of positive affect on intuitive individuals is to instill an approach mindset, perhaps sending a signal to trust their instincts.