Affect Infusion Model - The AIM As A Research Tool

The AIM As A Research Tool

Along with a clearer understanding of the effect of mood on a person's information processing, the AIM also provides a guide by which researchers can design experiments to investigate the effect of sending persuasive messages to subjects. One important area of research involves the concept of 'mood congruence', or how the results of mood compare to the mood itself. It has been found that 'mood congruence' occurs when a person exhibits a positive relationship between his or her mood and a dependent variable; essentially, as the strength of the mood increases or decreases, so the performance measured by this variable increases or decreases correspondingly. Conversely, 'mood incongruence' occurs when a person exhibits a negative relationship between mood and the dependent variable; thus, as mood increases, performance decreases and vice versa.

This distinction has been used to study the relationship between moods and personal goals. For those who are mood congruent, mood generally has a positive relationship with goal motivation, which presents a major opportunity to designers of public health information. According to this line of thought, establishing a positive mood state within the emotional feel of a message and then psychologically connecting that state to the desired behavior would be critical to the message's efficacy.

The AIM has also provided useful insights to other fields. In consumer research, the AIM has helped to explain how males and females differ in their processing of advertising under happy and sad mood states.