Personal responsibility and salience of the request for help: Determinants of the relation between negative affect and helping behavior.

Abstract

Three experiments examined the relation between negative affect and helping behavior. The first hypothesis (Experiment 1), that attribution of responsibility to self for one's experimentally induced depressed mood would induce greater inclination to offer help when subsequently asked, was tested in a 2 X 2 factorial design that manipulated mood (negative vs. neutral) and attribution of respon-sibility for it (internal vs. external). The obtained opposite result seemed attrib-utable to the low salience of the request for help. Experiment 2 replicated Ex-periment 1 using a highly salient request for help and confirmed the initial hy-pothesis. In Experiment 3, a negative mood was induced in all subjects, and attribution of responsibility (internal vs. external) was crossed with salience of the helping request in a 2 X 2 factorial design in which the confederate who requested help was totally dissociated from the experiment and blind to the experimental conditions. The obtained interaction confirmed the prediction that internal attribution of responsibility increases willingness to help (as measured either behaviorally or attitudinally) when the request is salient, but inhibits it when the request lacks salience. Self-focus, as measured by the Stroop Color-Word Interference Test, was shown to mediate these effects. Research on the effect of negative affect on prosocial behavior has produced inconsistent results. When compared to the level of help offered when in a neutral affective state, neg-ative affect often decreases a person's will-ingness to help (Moore, Underwood, & Ro-

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