On the use of gender categories and emotion categories in threat‐based person impressions

People often form impressions of others in contexts where both relatively static demographic cues (e.g., age, race, gender) and situationally-flexible, dynamic emotion expressions) are available. We examined whether how attending to gender (male, female) versus expression (neutral, smiling) affects threat-based person impressions. In three experiments, we heightened the salience either categories or a sequential priming task. Category consistently moderated use threat impressions: The effect (emotion) was stronger when attention directed than (gender); however, category did not eliminate category. Implications for models construal bias discussed. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved