Lexical decision and word pronunciation experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotional state on word perception. Emotional states of happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the first two experiments, happy and sad subjects (and control subjects in Experiment 2) were presented with letter-strings, some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the perceiver was associated with facilitation of lexical decision about words categorically related to that emotion. In addition, regardless of emotional state, subjects made lexical decisions about positive (happy, love) words faster than about neutral control words, and slower about negative words (sad, anger) than about controls. Some evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word perception was observed in a third experiment that employed a word pronunciation task. Subjects also named all affective words faster than they named neutral control words. The emotion=congruence results are interpreted as supporting the prediction, based in a spreading activation model, that emotions prime lexical items specifically associated with the emotional state (categorical-emotion-congruence in perception; Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Jones, 1994). Implications for contextual influences on lexical access are discussed.