Collaborative Research: Investigating Underlying Mechanisms and Behavioral Consequences of Emotion-Induced Implicit Prejudice

这一合作研究项目的目标是考察偶然情绪加剧群体间偏见、刻板印象和歧视行为的条件。在群际语境中，偶然情绪是指个体在遇到群外成员之前可能正在经历的情感状态，其唤起与这些群组无关。因此，这些状态不同于整体情绪，整体情绪指的是当人们反思或遇到外部群体时直接唤起的情感状态。研究人员提出了一个理论模型，将选择性注意指定为偶发情绪与随后的判断和行动偏差之间最有可能的中介。本提案的主要目标是通过三组研究来检验拟议模型的准确性。第一组研究考察了选择性注意假说。这些研究考察了偶然情绪是否导致个体关注与激活的情绪有关的群体成员，以及这种关注是否特别集中在群体中与情绪相关的特征上。这些研究还考察了偶发情绪是否会增加与目标群体明确相关的情绪(整合情绪)，并关注目标群体中个体的偶发情绪特定特征。第二组研究验证了这样的假设，即偶然情绪对目标群体中非典型成员的知觉影响比典型成员更大。第三组研究集中在附带情绪的行为后果上。这些研究检验了这样一种假设，即附带情绪对注意力的影响，以及内隐偏见可以导致歧视性行为。重要的是，这个项目将通过加强两个拥有不同专业知识的实验室之间的合作来建立科学基础设施：情绪研究和内隐社会认知。该项目还将为代表不足的少数群体成员提供许多接受科学研究培训的机会。

The goal of this collaborative research project is to examine the conditions under which incidental emotions exacerbate intergroup prejudice, stereotyping, and discriminatory behavior. In the intergroup context, incidental emotions refer to affective states that individuals may be experiencing immediately before they encounter outgroup members and whose evocation is unrelated to these groups. As such, these states are different from integral emotions, which refer to affective states that are directly evoked by an outgroup when people reflect on or encounter them. The investigators propose a theoretical model that specifies selective attention as the most likely mediator between incidental emotion and subsequent bias in judgments and action. The primary goal of the present proposal is to test the veracity of the proposed model in three sets of studies. The first set of studies examines the selective attention hypothesis. These studies examine whether incidental emotions cause individuals to focus on members of groups stereotypically associated with the activated emotion, and whether this attention is focused particularly on emotion relevant features of the groups. These studies also examine whether incidental emotion increases emotions explicitly tied to the target group (integral emotion) and a focus on incidental emotion specific features of individuals in the target group. The second set of studies tests the hypothesis that incidental emotion affects perceptions of non-prototypical members of target groups more than prototypic members. The third set of studies focus on the behavioral consequences of incidental emotion. These studies examine the hypothesis that the effect of incidental emotions on attention, and implicit biases can cause discriminatory behaviors. Importantly, this project will build scientific infrastructure by strengthening collaborations between two labs with different expertise: the study of emotion and implicit social cognition. This project will also provide many opportunities for members of underrepresented minorities to be trained in scientific research.