Niedenthal and Colleagues Put Participants into Either a Sad, Happy

Multiple Choice

Niedenthal and colleagues put participants into either a sad, happy, or neutral state, and asked them to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters were words or not. Some of the words were emotionally laden, relating to sadness, anger, happiness, and love. What did they find?

A) Happy participants recognized words related to love and happiness faster than participants in neutral or sad states
B) Sadness had no effect on participants' speed of recognition, but happiness made participants faster to recognize all emotional words compared to participants in other emotion states
C) Happy participants recognized words with happy meaning faster than other participants, but they did not have a reaction time advantage for words related to love or negative emotions.
D) Sad participants were faster to recognize the positive emotion words compared to other participants, because the contrast between their own state and the words caused a pop-out effect