Relationship To Risk Behavior
Because mood itself is relatively complex, being the sum of many smaller emotional experiences with no single cause, pinpointing its real-world influence is no easy task. But scholars have used the AIM to examine a number of social phenomena with a variety of results. One area of research involving the AIM concerns the model's role in understanding an individual's propensity for risk taking. Since risky behavior can trigger a complex and varied set of emotional responses (elation, fear, acceptance, etc.), a person's mood might be expected to play a substantial and unpredictable role in any choice to take heavy risks. If a person is in a good mood, he or she might be more likely to appraise the risk positively and be willing to accept any consequences in advance. But even if they are in a bad mood, they could be more likely to rebel against their cultural norms and take the risk anyway.
This relationship has been examined in a particular experiment by attempting to manipulate a person's mood in order to produce infusion responses. The hypothesis is that the "risk taking tendency is greater for those individuals who are in a happy mood than for those who are in a sad mood". Participants in this experiment were exposed to one of three priming movies (happy, sad, or neutral) and then measured on a risk-taking scale. The researchers divided the sample into two units of separation, one being age (old and young) and the other being mood valence (happy, neutral and sad). Not only did their data confirm their hypothesis for both younger and older participants, but it also confirmed the AIM as a legitimate instrument for studying the complexities of mood.
Another study examined how the AIM relates to a specific type of risk behavior: gambling. It investigated how mood affects an individual's sustained inclination to gamble, especially among non-regular gamblers. The researchers separated regular and non-regular gamblers and measured how their moods affected their experiences on the gaming floor. Specifically, they expected non-regular gamblers in a good mood to be more persistent than non-regular gamblers in a bad mood. This is because gambling, when it is a new and unfamiliar experience, complete with the bright lights and colors that are a feature of the average casino, requires a great deal of information processing, making it especially unattractive to someone in a bad mood. Their research confirmed this notion, but in addition, it was used to positively identify depression as a causal factor of addictive gambling, when the casino has become a familiar environment.
Read more about this topic: Affect Infusion Model
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