Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1990, Vol. 58, No. 5,899-908 Copyright 1990 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0O22-3514/9O/SO0.75 Does Affect Induce Self-Focused Attention? Joanne Y Wood, Judith A. Saltzberg, and Lloyd A. Goldsamt State University of New \brk at Stony Brook Despite growing evidence that depression is linked with self-focused attention, little is known about how depressed individuals become self-focused or, more generally, about what arouses self- focus in everyday life. Two experiments examined the hypothesis that affect itself induces self- focused attention. In Experiment 1, moods were manipulated with an imagination mood-induction procedure. Sad-induction Ss became higher in self-focus than did neutral-induction Ss. Experiment 2 replicated this effect for sad moods by means of a musical mood-induction procedure and different measures of self-focus. However, Experiment 2 failed to support the hypothesis that happy moods induce self-focus. The results have implications for mood-induction research, self- focused attention, and recent models of depression. Depressed people seem to be more introspective and self- absorbed than people who are happy. When talking with others, for example, depressed people refer to themselves more frequently than do nondepressed people, even when the normal flow of conversation calls for more attention to the other per- son (Jacobson & Anderson, 1982). Such observations suggest that it may be fruitful to examine the link between depression and the construct of self-focused attention (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklund, 1972). Depression and Self-Focused Attention Recently, Smith and Greenberg (1981) noted several striking similarities between depression and self-focused attention, par- ticularly private self-focus, which refers to attention to one's own thoughts and feelings. The separate literatures on depres- sion and self-focus suggest, for example, that both depressed individuals and privately self-focused individuals are especially accurate in their self-reports and often have low self-esteem (for references, see Ingram & Smith, 1984; Smith & Greenberg, This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH42324 to Joanne V Wood. Experiment 1 was presented in August 1987 at the 95th Annual Convention of the American Psycho- logical Association. Experiment 2 was presented in November 1988 at the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy annual con- vention. We thank the following people for their help with the empirical aspects of this research: Jack Blanchard, William Beacher, Andrea Caruso, Chris Dodig, Paul Whitaker, and Christine Yaroff. We are also grateful to Jack Wright and Walter Mischel for providing transcripts of their mood-induction tapes, Dan Wegner for providing a copy of the pronoun measure, David Clark for sending sample music tapes, Jeff Greenberg for the description of the coding procedure for thought samples, and Marc Schwartz for providing the validity data for the thought sample measure. In addition, we thank John Bargh, John Mi- chela, John Neale, and Marc Schwartz for their helpful comments on drafts of the manuscript. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Joanne V Wood, who is now at the Department of Psychology, Univer- sity of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1. 1981). Such similarities have led to two models of depression that incorporate self-focus (Lewinsohn, Hoberman, Teri, & Hautzinger, 1985; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987). Although the empirical literature on self-focus and depres- sion is fairly young, it is promising. First, a positive correlation between depression and self-focus has been demonstrated with various measures of depression, with both situational and dis- positional measures of private self-focus, and in both clinically depressed and nonclinical samples (Ingram, Lumry, Cruet, & Sieber, 1987; Ingram & Smith, 1984; Smith & Greenberg, 1981; Smith, Ingram, & Roth, 1985). Second, studies have begun to indicate that self-focus is associated with some of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral correlates of depression (e.g, Gibbons et al, 1985; Ingram et al, 1987; Pyszczynski, Holt, & Green- berg, 1987; Strack, Blaney, Ganellen, & Coyne, 1985). Espe- cially intriguing is Pyszczynski and Greenberg's (1985,1986) discovery of a "depressive self-focusing style." Whereas nonde- pressed people appear to enjoy being self-focused when they have recently succeeded but try to escape self-focus after they have failed (e.g, Gibbons & Wicklund, 1976), depressed people show the opposite pattern: They prefer self-focus after failure and avoid self-focus after success. How Is Self-Focus Created? One important remaining question concerns how a state of self-focused attention is created. Most studies of self-focus have addressed the consequences or concomitants of self-focus rather than what brings about a self-focused state. In laboratory studies, researchers have induced self-focus by means of stimuli that serve as reminders of the self, such as mirrors, cameras, and voice recordings (see Carver & Scheier, 1981). A few studies point to naturalistic inducers of self-focus such as eye contact, the presence of an audience, and bodily activity (Carver & Scheier, 1978; Fenigstein & Carver, 1978; Scheier, Fenigstein, & Buss, 1974). For example, when subjects became physiologi- cally aroused by running in place or by climbing a hill, they became self-focused (Wegner & Giuliano, 1980,1983). How- ever, these naturalistic inducers do not offer an explanation for why self-focus is higher among depressed people than among 899 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.