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Investors frequently make judgments and decisions in the presence of affect (i.e., mood or emotion). Investors' moods may influence the extent to which they incorporate available financial information in their investment judgments. I propose that investors interpret their moods as signals of the extent to which financial information should be processed to make investment judgments, but only when other, more direct signals regarding the need for in-depth processing are unavailable. Consistent with research in psychology, my experimental results suggest that investors experiencing positive mood exert less effort to process available financial information than investors experiencing negative mood. Consequently, positive mood results in lower-quality financial judgments in my setting. However, when investors receive cues suggesting that initially received information is subjective, the effect of mood on effort to process financial information is mitigated. Overall, my results suggest that factors associated with positive investor mood (e.g., positive market sentiment) reduce the depth of investor analysis and lower judgment quality absent signals regarding the subjectivity of financial information.

The relevance of affective factors in the charismatic leadership process has been widely acknowledged in leadership research. Building on this notion, the present study empirically investigated the role of leaders’ positive mood and emotional intelligence in the development of charismatic leadership behaviors. We developed hypotheses linking these constructs and tested them in a sample of 34 leaders and their 165 direct followers from a multinational corporation. Results showed that both leaders’ positive mood and leaders’ emotional intelligence were positively related to their charismatic leadership behaviors, as rated by followers. Further, we found leaders’ emotional intelligence to moderate the relationship between leaders’ positive mood and their charismatic leadership behaviors. Emotionally intelligent leaders exhibited charismatic leadership behaviors to a high extent, largely irrespective of their degree of positive mood. In contrast, leaders low on emotional intelligence were more likely to exhibit charismatic behaviors when their positive mood was high, while they were less likely to exhibit such behaviors when their positive mood was low. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for leadership theory, research, and practice.

Multiple intelligence, cognitive thinking, and sensory theories provide the framework for understanding how to improve learning and learning environments for students. Research involving the use of a multimodal video game to enhance student learning is discussed. It is proposed in the chapter that multimodal and multiplayer video games make use of sensory-rich interactions to engage users, create meaningful experiences, and often facilitate communication between people located all over the world. Multiple learning theories are addressed and evaluated in order to bring to light issues and areas for investigation when designing technology-rich learning environments. Implications of the findings in relation to connections with gaming technologies, capacity for community building, and next steps for investigating ideal designs for 21st century learning environments are discussed.

We offer a new perspective on group affective diversity by introducing the construct of mixed group mood, denoting co-occurring positive and negative mood states between different members of a group. Mixed group mood is characterized by four facets, namely members’ distribution between two positive and negative subgroups, subgroups’ average mood intensity, subgroups’ mood intensity heterogeneity, and individual members’ mood ambivalence. Building on information/decision-making and social categorization/similarity–attraction perspectives, we explore the performance consequences of mixed group mood along these four facets and we discuss implications and directions for future research.

Proactivity is a type of goal-directed work behavior in which individuals actively take charge of situations to bring about future change in themselves or their organization. In this chapter, we draw on goal-regulation research to review conceptual and empirical evidence that elucidates some of the complex links of affective experience and employee proactivity. We identify the different ways in which affective experience influences different stages of proactivity, including employees’ efforts in setting a proactive goal (envisioning), preparing to implement their proactive goal (planning), implementing their proactive goal (enacting), and engaging in learning from their proactive goal process (reflecting). Overall, our review suggests an important, positive role of high-activated positive trait affectivity and moods in motivating proactivity across multiple goal stages, as compared to low-activated positive affectivity and moods. The role of negative affect is mixed, and likely depends on both its valence and the stage of proactivity that is being considered. We identify a lack of research on the role of discrete emotions for employee proactivity. We discuss future avenues for research, particularly the roles of intra- and inter-personal emotion regulation for proactivity and of affective embeddedness of proactive processes in the social environment of organizations.

In this chapter, we seek to resolve the long-running controversy as to whether moods foster or inhibit creativity. We base our arguments on a new theory, which we refer to as “creativity-as-mood-regulation,” where employees experiencing moods are envisaged to engage in creative behavior in the hope of regulating their moods. We further suggest that employees with different goal orientations will have different likelihoods of choosing creative activities to regulate their moods. Finally, we identify the specific goal-orientation conditions under which positive and negative moods may facilitate or depress creativity, and develop and discuss six related propositions.

For many years now, both organizational researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role played by employee happiness on a number of workplace outcomes. In particular, many have been fascinated by the happy/productive worker thesis. According to this hypothesis, happy employees exhibit higher levels of job-related performance behaviors than do unhappy employees. However, despite decades of research, support for the happy/productive worker thesis remains equivocal. These inconsistent findings primarily result from the variety of ways in which happiness has been operationalized. Most typically, organizational theorists have operationalized happiness as job satisfaction, as the presence of positive affect, as the absence of negative affect, as the lack of emotional exhaustion, and as psychological well being. I will review this literature using the circumplex framework as the taxonomic guideline. In addition, drawing on the impetus of the “positive psychology” movement, I propose Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001, 2003) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions as one approach especially well-suited for future research to better understand the happy/productive worker thesis.