Previous research has found that sympathetic arousal will cue information stored in memory with a similar level of arousal. To investigate the effect of arousal on the interpretation of other people's emotions, three studies were conducted. In the first study, 37 adult tennis players, who were either about to play tennis or who had just played, rated positive or negative phrases on a 7-point scale indicating serenity/joy (for the positive statements) or depression/anger (for the negative statements). An analysis of the results showed that arousal biased judgments of positive stimuli toward joy and judgments of negative stimuli toward anger. In the second study, 16 college students rated slides on a 5-point scale indicating the serenity/joy or depression/anger dichotomies, either prior to or following a soccer practice. The results of this study replicated the results of the first study for positive stimuli. However, no support for an effect of negative stimuli was demonstrated. In the third study, 39 college students rated slides, as in the second study, either before or after an exercise period. The results again replicated the results of the other studies in that increases in arousal biased judgments of positive stimuli but not judgments of negative stimuli. (BL)