Communicator mood and the reluctance to transmit undesirable messages (the Mum effect).

In order to examine the effects of mood on the transmission of good and bad news 48 female Ss, recruited for an “aesthetics experiment,” overheard a message intended for another S containing either good or had news, and were subsequently put into a pleasant or unpleasant mood. The results indicated that when Ss were confronted with the person for whom the message was intended (1) their mood tended to shift in a direction that was consistent with the affective nature of the message (p<.01); (2) good news was communicated more fully/spontaneously than bad news (p <.01); and (3) Ss in an initially unpleasant mood tended to communicate more spontaneously than Ss in a pleasant mood (p <.05), especially when the news was good.