Examined the impact of recipients' mood on the processing of simple, persuasive communications and on subsequent behavior. Following the assumption that affective states inform an individual about the state of its current environment, positive (compared to neutral or negative) mood reduced S's motivation to systematically process both content information and contextual cues. Exp 1 demonstrated that, in a field setting, the behavior of 78 adult Ss put in a good mood was less likely to reflect differences in message content than the behavior of Ss in a neutral mood. Exp 2 replicated and extended these findings, showing that good mood in 73 adult Ss' behavior was uninfluenced by content and context information, whereas bad mood Ss made use of both types of information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved)