Noncompliance with online mood manipulations using film clips: how to detect and control for it

The reliability of online mood manipulations is potentially undermined by participants’ noncompliance behavior, e.g., skipping a part of the experiment or switching between web pages during the mood manipulation. The goal of the current research is to investigate (1) whether and how mood manipulations are threatened by noncompliance behavior, (2) whether it is confounded with the induced mood state as predicted by Affect Regulation Theory, and (3) what measures can be taken to control for the noncompliance. In two online-experiments, noncompliance behavior was assessed during the mood manipulation with movie clips by tracking interruptions of watching and page switches. The results support the affect regulation hypothesis demonstrating that people confronted with negative emotional content interrupted watching the video and switched between pages more often than people with positive content. Methodologically, this causes a threat to the internal validity of internet-based mood manipulation studies. To decrease the risk of noncompliance, the current study recommends to block skipping a part of the mood manipulation, detect page focus events and measure the time people stay on a page.