Mood Bias Research Articles

Affective influences on stereotype judgements

Abstract What role does affect play in stereotype judgements? This experiment investigated mood effects on perceptions of Asian (heterosterotype) or Causcasian (autostereotype) characters who were part of a same-race or a mixed-race dyad. We expected that mood should (a) distort stereotype judgements in a mood-consistent direction, and (b) that mood biases should be stronger for mixed-race dyads that require more detailed and inferential processing. Happy, neutral or sad mood was induced in subjects (n=198) using an audio-visual mood induction procedure in an allegedly separate experiment. Subjects were then asked to form impressions of Asian or Caucasian targets associated with a same-race or an other-race partner. As predicted, we found consistent mood-congruent biases in such. However, both positive and negative mood effects were significantly greater when a target was part of a mixed-race dyad, a condition presumably requiring more detailed and substantive inferential processing. These findings are in...

After the Movies

The effects of transient moods on a variety of social judgments were studied in an unobtrusive field study. Subjects were interviewed immediately after leaving film performances classified as predominantly happy, sad, or aggressive in affective tone. Questions covered four topic areas: political judgments, expectations about the future, judgments of responsibility and guilt, and quality-of-life judgments. Judgments on all four question categories were significantly influenced by the affective quality of the films. Judgments were more positive, lenient or optimistic after viewing a happy film than after a sad or an aggressive film. These mood biases were universal irrespective of the demographic background of subjects, suggesting the robustness of the phenomenon. The results were interpreted in terms of recent models of emotional influences on social cognition, and the practical implications of the findings were considered.