The impact of submissive versus dominant authoritarianism and negative emotions on prejudice

The two present studies tested the relationships between the negative emotions of fear, anger, and sadness and the social attitudes of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). It was hypothesized that these specific emotions interact with the social attitudes exerting an influence on prejudice toward outgroups with varying status levels. The emotions studied reflected general predispositions to experience particular affective states (Study 1) or were evoked by the activation of various emotionally-laden episodic memories (Study 2). The results revealed that anger increases RWA based prejudice and fear increases SDO based prejudice when a low status outgroup is considered. Sadness enhances both RWA and SDO based prejudice when a high status outgroup is targeted.