Effects of Testimonial Inconsistencies and Witness Group Identity on Mock‐Juror Judgments1

We examined the interaction of testimonial consistency and witness group identity on mock jurors' judgments of witness effectiveness, probability that the defendant committed the crime, and verdict. In a 3 × 2 (Witness Group Identity × Testimonial Consistency) between‐groups design, 180 mock jurors heard a trial of a person charged with assault. Although both variables affected judgments, group‐identity effects were weak when testimony was characterized by inconsistencies, and they were stronger when testimony was internally consistent but ambiguous. The judgment patterns were consistent with predictions from Chaiken, Liberman, and Eagly's (1989) heuristic‐systematic processing theory, suggesting that heuristic processing would bias systematic processing when the evidence was not decisive.     

Mood effects on emotion recognition

Mood affects memory and social judgments. However, findings are inconsistent with regard to how mood affects emotion recognition: For sad moods, general performance decrements in emotion recognition have been reported, as well as an emotion specific bias, such as better recognition of sad facial expressions compared to happy expressions (negative bias). Far less research has been conducted on the influence of happy moods on emotion recognition. We primed 93 participants with happy, sad, or neutral moods and had them perform an emotion recognition task. Results showed a negative bias for participants in sad moods and a positive bias for participants in happy moods. Sad and happy moods hampered the recognition of mood-incongruent expressions; the recognition of mood-congruent expressions was not affected by moods.     

Affective state and event-based prospective memory

Event-based prospective memory tasks require the realisation of a delayed intention at the occurrence of a specific target event. The present research investigates how performance in this kind of prospective memory task is influenced by the current affective state. By manipulating participants' mood during intention realisation we tested two competing models of mood effects on memory (i.e., a capacity consuming account and a processing style account). Furthermore, we manipulated the valence of the target event to investigate mood-congruency effects in prospective memory. No evidence was found for a mood-congruency effect, but the results showed that prospective memory performance increased with a sad mood. This effect is consistent with recent theories on mood-dependent processing-style regulation, postulating that a sad mood produces a more analytic and detailed processing style whereas a happy mood produces a more global and less detailed processing style.     

Can negative affect eliminate the power of first impressions? Affective influences on primacy and recency effects in impression formation

Can good or bad mood influence the common tendency for people to form judgments based on first impressions? Based on research on impression formation and recent work on affect and social cognition, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood increased, and negative mood eliminated the primacy effect. After an autobiographical mood induction (recalling happy or sad past events), participants (N = 284) formed impressions about a character, Jim described either in an introvert-extrovert, or an extrovert-introvert sequence (Luchins, 1958). Impression formation judgments revealed clear mood and primacy main effects, as well as a mood by primacy interaction. Primacy effects were increased by positive mood, consistent with the more assimilative, holistic processing style associated with positive affect. Negative mood in turn eliminated primacy effects, consistent with a more accommodative, externally focused processing style. The relevance of these findings for first impressions in everyday judgments is considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed.     

Negative incidental affect and mood congruency in crossed categorization

Examined the effects of incidental sadness and anger on affiliative responses to crossed categorization targets. Affect manipulations included an anger-provoking frustration (Study 1), a sad film clip (Study 2), and autobiographical essays about sad or anger-provoking topics (Studies 3 and 4). By comparison with a neutral mood, anger (Study 1) reduced affiliative tendencies toward persons possessing an out-group membership but not toward those possessing only in-group memberships. Study 2 showed a similar pattern for sadness. Studies 3 and 4 replicated these effects in designs including both types of negative mood. Meta-analytic integration showed the pattern of greater rejection of targets with an out-group membership to be stronger under anger than sadness. Study 4 also showed that despite yielding a consistent pattern for affiliation, sadness and anger differentially elicited aggressive tendencies toward the same targets.     

Effects of induced sad mood on facial emotion perception in young and older adults

Older adults perceive less intense negative emotion in facial expressions compared to younger counterparts. Prior research has also demonstrated that mood alters facial emotion perception. Nevertheless, there is little evidence which evaluates the interactive effects of age and mood on emotion perception. This study investigated the effects of sad mood on younger and older adults’ perception of emotional and neutral faces. Participants rated the intensity of stimuli while listening to sad music and in silence. Measures of mood were administered. Younger and older participants’ rated sad faces as displaying stronger sadness when they experienced sad mood. While younger participants showed no influence of sad mood on happiness ratings of happy faces, older adults rated happy faces as conveying less happiness when they experienced sad mood. This study demonstrates how emotion perception can change when a controlled mood induction procedure is applied to alter mood in young and older participants.     

幼儿生气和伤心情绪情景理解

考察三类成人（113名幼儿母亲、42名幼儿教师、221名大学生）对西方研究者常用的22个生气和伤心情景中幼儿情绪的推断;以中国成人的情绪情景理解为标准,进一步考察120名4-6岁幼儿生气和伤心情景理解能力的发展。结果表明：三类成人一致推断的6个生气情景和6个伤心情景,与西方研究者的界定基本一致;幼儿的伤心情景理解能力显著高于生气情景理解能力;4岁幼儿的伤心情景理解能力显著低于5岁和6岁幼儿     

Monitoring of learning for emotional faces: how do fine-grained categories of emotion influence participants’ judgments of learning and beliefs about memory?

Researchers have evaluated how broad categories of emotion (i.e. positive and negative) influence judgments of learning (JOLs) relative to neutral items. Specifically, JOLs are typically higher for emotional relative to neutral items. The novel goal of the present research was to evaluate JOLs for fine-grained categories of emotion. Participants studied faces with afraid, angry, sad, or neutral expressions (Experiment 1) and with afraid, angry, or sad expressions (Experiment 2). Participants identified the expressed emotion, made a JOL for each, and completed a recognition test. JOLs were higher for the emotional relative to neutral expressions. However, JOLs were insensitive to the categories of negative emotion. Using a survey design in Experiment 3, participants demonstrated idiosyncratic beliefs about emotion. Some people believed the fine-grained emotions were equally memorable, whereas others believed a specific emotion (e.g. anger) was most memorable. Thus, beliefs about emotion are nuanced, which has important implications for JOL theory.     

Aggressive Outcomes and Videogame Play: The Role of Length of Play and the Mechanisms at Work

We conducted three experiments to rectify methodological limitations of prior studies on selective exposure to music and, thereby, clarify the nature of the impact of sad mood on music preference. In all studies, we experimentally manipulated mood (sad vs. neutral in Experiments 1 and 2; sad vs. neutral vs. happy in Experiment 3) and then assessed participants' preferences for expressively happy versus sad musical selections. To further help illuminate the reasons for their music preferences, we also asked participants to indicate how they believed listening to each song would affect their current emotional state as well as how appropriate they felt it would be to select a given song. Results suggested that individuals in sad moods were not reliably inclined to listen to sad songs, but rather, were strongly averse to listening to happy songs, apparently out of concern that choosing such songs would feel inappropriate. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of selective media exposure and emotion regulation.     

Mood and the perception of unusual people: Affective asymmetry in memory and social judgments

Does good and bad mood have a different influence on our perceptions of typical and atypical people? In this experiment, people in happy, sad or neutral moods recalled, and formed impressions of high- or low-prototypical characters. We expected an asymmetric mood effect on memory, with better recall of typical targets that require simplified, schematic processing in positive mood, but greater negative mood effects on atypical targets that require more detailed and inferential processing. Subjects (N = 66) an audio-visual mood induction in an allegedly separate experiment, before recalling, and forming impressions about people who were consistent or inconsistent with familiar prototypes within their social milieu. We found the predicted mood-congruent bias in judgments, that was significantly greater for non-typical than for typical people. We also found evidence for positive-negative mood asymmetry in memory, with better recall of typical people in positive mood, and atypical people in negative mood. The findings are discussed in terms of contemporary multi-process models of affect and cognition (Forgas, 1992), and the implications for everyday affective influences on social judgments and stereotyping are considered.     

Differentiating the effects of anger and sadness: A perspective of spontaneous trait inference

In the present research, three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of anger and sadness on spontaneous trait inferences (STIs). Using a probe recognition paradigm, Experiment 1 revealed that angry participants made more errors in response to probes following trait‐implying behaviours than sad participants did. Using a false recognition paradigm, Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that angry participants made more errors in response to systematic pair trials than sad participants did. The three experiments provided convergent evidence that angry individuals were more inclined to form STIs than sad individuals were. The current research first demonstrated the different effects of specific negative mood states (anger vs. sadness) on STIs, providing further insight into the relationship between mood and STIs.     

Being Happy and Seeing 'Happy' ': Emotional State Mediates Visual Word Recognition

Lexical decision and word-naming experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotions in visual word recognition. Emotional states of happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the first two experiments, happy and sad participants (and neutral-emotion participants in Experiment 2) made lexical decisions about letter-strings, some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the perceiver was associated with facilitation of response to words categorically related to that emotion (i.e. happy and sad words). However, such facilitation was not observed for words that were related by valence, but not category, to the induced emotions (i.e. love and anger words). Evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word recognition was also observed in a third experiment that employed a word-naming task. Together the results support a categorical emotions model of the influences of emotion in information processing (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Jones, 1994). Moreover, the result of the wordnaming experiment suggests that the effects of emotion are evident at very early stages in cognitive processing.     

Mood, memory, and social judgments in children

The influence of positive and negative moods on children's recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments was investigated in a two-list experimental design. A total of 161 schoolchildren, 8 to 10 years old, were presented with audiovisual information containing positive and negative details about 2 target children. Each presentation was preceded by happy or sad mood manipulations. One day later, the children were again placed in a happy or sad mood, and their recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments were assessed. Results showed that memory was better when (a) the children felt happy during encoding, retrieval, or both; (b) the material was incongruent with learning mood; (c) the 2 target characters were encountered in contrasting rather than in matching mood states; and (d) recall mood matched encoding mood. A happy mood increased the extremity of both positive and negative impression-formation judgments. Results are contrasted with experimental data obtained with normal or depressed adults, and implications are considered for contemporary theories of mood effects on cognition and for social-developmental research.     

心境对未来事件发生概率判断的影响

本研究采用短影片人为诱发心境的方法,用正性和负性两种情绪事件作为刺激材料,在控制人格变量的前提下,探讨了大学生在不同心境下对未来事件发生概率的判断中是否存在心境一致性效应。结果表明：（1）愉悦心境会增加做出积极判断的倾向,悲伤心境会增加做出消极判断的倾向;（2）无论是在愉悦心境还是在悲伤心境中,被试在对未来事件发生概率的判断上不存在性别差异。结果支持心境对未来事件发生概率判断有所影响,即诱发的心境与未来事件的效价存在一致性效应。     

高确定性情绪（开心、愤怒）与低确定性情绪（悲伤）对信任的影响

本研究通过信任游戏的实验范式探讨了在与“受信任者”高/低可信赖性有关的信任线索时,具体情绪的确定性维度对信任行为的影响。实验一发现,当被试被告知“受信任者”在可信赖量表上的得分（高/低）时,个体在高确定性情绪（开心和愤怒）下的信任判断比低确定性情绪（悲伤）下的信任判断上更容易被受信任者的“可信赖性”水平的高低所影响;实验二发现,当告知被试“受信任者”的群体身份（内/外群）时,个体在高确定性情绪（开心和愤怒）下的信任判断比低确定性情绪（悲伤）下的信任判断更容易被受信任者的“内外群”身份所影响。上述结果表明,高确定性的情绪比低确定性的情绪更容易使被试的信任判断受到与“受信任者”是否值得信赖有关的线索所影响。     

Effects of emotional state on lexical decision performance

The effect of emotional state on lexical processing was investigated. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a happy or sad mood condition. Emotional state was then induced by listening to 8 min of classical music previously rated to induce happy or sad moods. Response times and error rates were analyzed in a lexical decision task involving sad words, happy words, and pseudowords. Results suggest that emotion aided the participants in responding to emotion-congruent stimuli. The sad group responded faster than the happy group to sad words and the happy group responded faster than the sad group to happy words. Results are discussed with regard to information processing and emotion.     

Emotional faces in neutral crowds: Detecting displays of anger,happiness, and sadness on schematic and photographic images of faces

Detection of angry, happy and sad faces among neutral backgrounds was investigated in three single emotion tasks and an emotion comparison task using schematic (Experiment 1) and photographic faces (Experiment 2). Both experiments provided evidence for the preferential detection of anger displays over displays of other negative or positive emotions in tasks that employed all three target emotions. Evidence for preferential detection of negative emotion in general was found only with schematic faces. The present results are consistent with the notion that the detection of displays of anger, and to some extent sadness, does not reflect on a pre-attentive mechanism, but is the result of a more efficient visual search than is the detection of positive emotion.     

The sad, the angry, and the asymmetrical brain: dichotic listening studies of negative affect and depression

Dichotic Listening (DL) is a valuable tool to study emotional brain lateralization. Regarding the perception of sadness and anger through affective prosody, the main finding has been a left ear advantage (LEA) for the sad but contradictory data for the anger prosody. Regarding an induced mood in the laboratory, its consequences upon DL were a diminished right ear advantage (REA) for the induction of sadness and an increased REA for the induction of anger. The global results fit with the approach-withdrawal motivational model of emotional processing, pointing to sadness as a right hemisphere emotion but anger processed bilaterally or even in the left hemisphere, depending on the subject's preferred mode of expression. On the other hand, the study of DL in clinically depressed patients found an abnormally larger REA in verbal DL tasks which was predictive of therapeutic pharmacological response. However, the mobilization of the available left hemisphere resources in these responders (reflected in a higher REA) would indicate a remission of the episode but would not assure the absence of new relapses.     

Emotional language processing: how mood affects integration processes during discourse comprehension

This research tests whether mood affects semantic processing during discourse comprehension by facilitating integration of information congruent with moods’ valence. Participants in happy, sad, or neutral moods listened to stories with positive or negative endings during EEG recording. N400 peak amplitudes showed mood congruence for happy and sad participants: endings incongruent with participants’ moods demonstrated larger peaks. Happy and neutral moods exhibited larger peaks for negative endings, thus showing a similarity between negativity bias (neutral mood) and mood congruence (happy mood). Mood congruence resulted in differential processing of negative information: happy mood showed larger amplitudes for negative endings than neutral mood, and sad mood showed smaller amplitudes. N400 peaks were also sensitive to whether ending valence was communicated directly or as a result of inference. This effect was moderately modulated by mood. In conclusion, the notion of context for discourse processing should include comprehenders’ affective states preceding language processing.