Collaborative Research: The Effect of Emotions on Automatic Intergroup Evaluation, Goals, and Behavior

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This project brings together two areas of research: intergroup cognition and emotion. The goal is to investigate how social perceivers' emotional states shape their attitudes of specific social targets in ways outside of their awareness and control. Although the past two decades have witnessed new and important insights into psychological processes underlying the form and function of stereotypes and prejudice, the role of the emotional system in shaping these phenomena has only recently been explored systematically. For example, research on the interplay between emotion and social cognition has revealed that specific emotional states (e.g., anger, sadness, happiness) have distinct effects on consciously reported beliefs and attitudes toward social groups, but it is silent about whether and how emotions shape nonconscious expressions of intergroup perception and behavior. Given that emotions exist to promote adaptive responses to important environmental challenges, it seems reasonable to expect that they should influence people's ability to appraise stimuli quickly and automatically as well as slowly and carefully. Moreover, given that membership in social groups, and the benefits and conflicts inherent in such affiliations, play a central role in human life, it is expected that appraisals of social groups are likely to be influenced by emotional states via both automatic and controlled mental processes. This project represents an initial attempt to examine the role of discrete emotions in shaping automatic and controlled intergroup cognition by examining whether specific negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness) produce different effects on automatic intergroup attitudes and, if so, how such attitudes contrast with self-reported judgments generated after thoughtful consideration.