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

Three experiments examined the relation between negative affect and helping behavior. The first hypothesis (Experiment 1), that attribution of responsibilit y 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 responsibility for it (internal vs. external). The obtained opposite result seemed attributable to the low salience of the request for help. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 using a highly salient request for help and confirmed the initial hypothesis. 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 ColorWord Interference Test, was shown to mediate these effects.