Mood

One’s mood may also influence one’s decision to help someone who is in
need. In general, people experiencing a positive mood, such as happiness,
are more likely to offer help than are those in neutral moods. Using quantitative
procedures for summarizing the results of thirty-four experimental
studies, Michael Carlson, Ventura Charlin, and Norman Miller concluded
that the best general explanation for why positive moods increase helpfulness
is that they heighten sensitivity to positive reinforcement or good outcomes.
This sensitivity includes both thinking more about good outcomes
for oneself and increased thought about the goodness of behaving prosocially.
This general summary incorporates many explanations that have
been proposed for the relation between positive moods and helping, among
them the mood maintenance and social outlook explanations.
Mood maintenance argues that one behaves more helpfully when happy
because doing so prolongs one’s good mood. The social outlook explanation
points instead to the fact that positive moods are often the consequences
of another person’s behavior (for example, being given a compliment).
Such actions by others trigger thoughts about human kindness,
cooperativeness, and goodness. These thoughts, if still present when someone
asks for help, make a person more likely to respond positively.

The effects of bad moods on helpfulness are more complex. Carlson and
Miller also quantitatively summarized the effects found in forty-four studies
concerned with the impact of various mood-lowering events on helpfulness.
These studies included such diverse procedures for inducing negative moods
as having subjects repeat depressing phrases, view unpleasant slides, imagine
sad experiences, and fail at a task. Two factors can apparently account for
most of the findings on negative moods and helping. The first is whether the
target of the mood-lowering event is the self or someone else; the second is
whether the self or an outside force is responsible for the mood-lowering
event. When one is responsible for imposing a mood-lowering event on another
person and therefore feels guilty, helping is very likely. When one is responsible
for an event that lowers one’s own mood (as when one engages in
self-harm) or when one witnesses another person impose a mood-lowering
event on someone else (that is, when one experiences empathy), a positive
response to a subsequent request for help is more likely but not as much so
as in the first case. In contrast, when someone else is responsible for one’s
own negative mood—when one has been victimized—one’s helpfulness
tends to be inhibited.