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

这个项目汇集了两个研究领域：群体间认知和情绪。其目的是调查社会接受者的情绪状态如何以他们意识和控制之外的方式塑造他们对特定社会目标的态度。尽管过去二十年见证了对刻板印象和偏见的形式和功能背后的心理过程的新的和重要的见解，但直到最近才系统地探讨了情绪系统在塑造这些现象中的作用。例如，关于情绪和社会认知之间相互作用的研究表明，特定的情绪状态(例如，愤怒、悲伤、快乐)对有意识地报告的对社会群体的信念和态度有明显的影响，但对于情绪是否以及如何形成群体间感知和行为的无意识表达，这一研究并未提及。鉴于情绪的存在是为了促进对重要环境挑战的适应性反应，似乎有理由认为它们应该影响人们快速、自动以及缓慢而谨慎地评估刺激的能力。此外，鉴于社会群体的成员身份以及这种联系所固有的利益和冲突在人类生活中发挥着核心作用，预计对社会群体的评价可能会受到情绪状态的影响，无论是自动的还是受控的心理过程。这个项目代表了一个初步的尝试，通过考察特定的负面情绪(例如，愤怒、悲伤)是否对自动的群体间态度产生不同的影响，以及如果是的话，这些态度如何与经过深思熟虑后产生的自我报告的判断相对比，来检验离散情绪在形成自动和受控的群体间认知中的作用。

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.