Negative effect and social judgment

Negative effect and social judgment

Many studies that look at the impact of affect on social perception and memory, have tended to focus on the effects of global mood and not on more specific kinds of emotional experiences. They suggest that bad moods are expected to have similar effects, regardless of whether they are characterized primarily by sadness, guilt, anger, anxiety or another negative emotion. ‘Mood’ is often used by some theorists to refer to diffuse affective states often having antecedents that are unclear to the person experiencing the mood. Emotion terms like ‘anger’ presumably arise from appraisals of specific actual states of the world. To understand the impact of affect on cognition better, researchers need to look beyond the global mood and examine the effects of more discrete kinds of emotional experience. In this paper, the researchers examined the effects of anger and sadness on social perception.

There are different reasons to suspect that different emotions may have different kinds of effects on cognitive processes. Anger and sadness show differences in their physiological manifestations and they are mediated by different elements of the limbic system. Anger involves activity in the amygdala and it is associated with an increase in blood pressure and pulse. Sadness involves activation in the hippocampus and it does not produce the same physiological effects as anger does. The differences are also reflected in subjective experience of bodily states. Angry people report experiencing symptoms of arousal, while sad people do not. So anger and sadness may have very different kinds of impact on cognition.

Mood congruency

People have to tendency to render judgments that are biased in the direction of a current mood state. This is called the mood congruency effect. According to models of this effect, affect primes/activates concepts in memory that are associated with the affective state. The concepts may cue the retrieval from memory of specific information relevant to the judgment. The impact of these processes is that a judgment is biased in the direction of the valence of the prevailing mood. If a person assumes that negative concepts are inter-associated in semantic memory, he/she will have difficulty to come up with a theoretical rationale for systematic differences between the effects of sadness and anger. He/she would expect both anger and sadness to activate negative concepts and both would therefore produce a tendency toward more negative judgments. There are also different explanations for the mood congruency effect. Some say that such effects have little to do with memory processes, and arise more directly from the use of mood as informational input in the judgment process. These scientists think that a misattribution process occurs in which people mistake their current mood (whatever its origins) for a reaction to a to-be-judged stimulus. When people are reminded that their current mood is based on something other than a reaction to the object of judgment, they no longer show a mood congruency effect.

Affect and cognitive strategies

There are many different ways of classifying the information-processing strategies of the social perceiver. Most attention has focused on the distinction between systematic processing on one hand and the heuristic, global processing on the other. Some think that different emotional states may predispose social perceivers to be more or less systematic in their information-processing strategies. Happiness has been associated with a more heuristic style of thinking. Happy people rely more on source cues and less on systematic assessment of message quality. They rely more on stereotypes and approach problem-solving tasks in a generally more heuristic way. It seems that happy people have less motivation for systematic thought or they have less cognitive capacity for such thought. Research has shown that sad and/or depressed people seem to use more systematic, detail-oriented strategies in social perception. Some researchers propose that this is because sadness is associated with problematic life circumstances and it therefore triggers cognitive strategies that are most likely to afford effective problem solving. Some suggest that sad people become cognitively absorbed in information-processing tasks as a means of distracting themselves from thoughts about the source of their sadness.

The empirical literature suggests that there are marked differences in the processing strategies of sad and happy people, but it does not say much on the issue of anger and information-processing strategies. It seems unlikely that being angry will be associated with thoughtful, systematic information processing. Angry people seem prone to impulsive judgments and actions. Maybe people have developed a tendency to react quickly and heuristically when angry for adaptive reasons. Anger is associated with more immediate threat or insult. It may also be that when a person is angry, he or she has difficulty to concentrate on other matters. Maybe angry people have a reduced capacity for systematic thinking. This leads to a predicted difference in the judgments of sad and angry people. Sad people seem to process social information more systematically, and angry people may react more impulsively and less deliberately.

Experiment 1

Stereotypes are judgmental heuristics that are lied upon by social perceivers when they lack the ability to think more extensively about the unique traits of outgroup members. Emotional states that are likely to engender heuristic styles of thinking will also include stereotypic thinking. In one study, people who had been made happy prior to engaging in a social judgment task, rendered more stereotypic judgments.

In the current experiment, participants were induced to feel either angry, sad or a neutral mood. They were then asked to read about a case of alleged misconduct on the part of a fellow student and to make some judgments about the case. For half of the cases, the accused student was identified as a member of a group that is stereotypically associated with the type of offence alleged in the case. For the other half of the cases, the case evidence was identical. After reading the case, participants were asked to fill out a short questionnaire outlining their reactions to the case. They had to rate the likelihood of the student defendant’s guilt. The writers expected that angry people (but not sad ones) would show greater use of the stereotype in making judgments about the case.

The results show that angry participants made greater use of their stereotypic beliefs than did sad participants. This implies that different kinds of negative affect can have different kinds of effects on social information processing. It is interesting to note that angry participants showed exactly the same pattern of judgments as those of happy subjects from previous studies. If happiness and anger can have similar effects on social judgment, while sadness and anger have different effects, researchers should look beyond affect valence per se.

Experiment 2

It seems that anger leads to an increased reliance on heuristic cues in social judgment and sadness leads to more systematic processing. If this is truly the case, then differences in the effects of anger and sadness should be evident not only in the use of stereotypes in perceptions of guilt but also in other social perception situations and with other kinds of heuristic cues. This second experiment was undertaken to determine whether the findings of the first experiment would generalize to persuasion situations. According to studies, reliance on superficial cues will be greater when motivation or ability to engage in more effortful processing of messages is constrained. Research has shown that happy people were more affected by simple cues instead of variations in argument quality. Sad people have been shown to be more affected by the quality of presented arguments. This second experiment compared the effects of heuristic cues on angry versus sad recipient of persuasive messages directly.

First, affective states were induced in participants (sadness, angry or neutral). The participants then read an essay about raising the legal driving age from 16 to 18 years (this study was conducted in the USA). The message consisted of six arguments for the advocated position. The essay was attributed to one of two possible sources. In the high expertise condition, the message was said to have been written by a group of transportation policy experts at Princeton University. In the low expertise condition, they essay was attributed to a group of students at a community college. After reading the essay, students had to report the extent of their agreement with the advocated position on a Likert-scale. They also had to report any thoughts that occurred to them as they read the appeal. After listing the thoughts, participants had to code them in terms of whether they were favourable, neutral or unfavourable with respect to the advocated position. The writers expected that the reactions of angry subjects to a persuasive appeal would be strongly influenced by the presence of a simple source cue, the expertise. The reactions of sad people would, according to the researchers, not be affected by this cue.

The results showed that angry participants had a tendency to agree more with the high-expertise source. This again shows that anger has different effects from sadness and that there is no general mood congruency pattern evident among the judgments of sad or angry people.

Experiment 3

This experiment looked like the second experiment, but this time the source’s trustworthiness (instead of expertise) was manipulated. When communicators advocate something that serves their own interests and agendas, they are seen as to be less trustworthy and they often have less persuasive impact than when they advocate a position that is at odds or unexpected with their own interests. Participants were first induced to a certain state (anger, neutral or sad) and then read an essay. The essay was about banning meat in University residence hall dining rooms at breakfast and lunch. The message consisted of five arguments for the advocated position and was attributed to one of two possible sources. In the high trustworthiness condition, the message was said to have been written by the Student Government League. This group promotes the interests and welfare of all college students. In the low trustworthiness condition, they essay was written by a Student Vegetarian League. This group actively promotes vegetarianism and animal rights. After reading the essays, students had to report the extent of their agreement with the advocated position. They had to report all thoughts that occurred to them as they read the essay and code them in terms of whether they were favourable, unfavourable or neutral with respect to the advocated position.

The results indicated again that angry participants agreed more with the trustworthy source than the source low in trustworthiness. Sad participants showed a tendency toward the reversed pattern.

All these studies show that researchers need to look beyond the valence of the social perceiver’s affective state per se. researchers need to explore the effects of discrete kinds of emotional experience on information processing. A straightforward mood congruency model of affect and cognition is inadequate to capture the impact of affect on social thought and judgment. Researchers need to look beyond mood valence. All negative moods are not alike.