Affective regulation of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes: Automatic and controlled processes

Three experiments indicate that affective cues regulate expression of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes. In Experiment 1, negative mood led to less stereotypic bias on the weapon-identification task [Payne, B. K. (2001). Prejudice and perception: The role of automatic and controlled processes in misperceiving a weapon. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 181–192] than positive mood. In Experiment 2, negative mood led to less implicitly measured racial prejudice than positive mood. In Experiment 3, negative, relative to positive, mood decreased women’s implicitly measured preference for the arts over math. Process–dissociation analyses suggested that affect regulated automatic attitude and stereotype activation rather than controlled influences on attitude expression. The results show that mood can shape even rudimentary forms of cognition. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Though there is great interest in the intersection between affect and cognition (e.g., Forgas, 1995; Schwarz & Clore, 2007), very little research has examined affective influences on implicitly measured attitudes and stereotypes. Recent research, however, showed that anger enhanced implicitly measured prejudice toward outgroups (DeSteno, Dasgupta, Bartlett, & Cajdric, 2004) whereas negative mood did not. The results were interpreted as due to differences in the relevance of anger and negative mood for intergroup relations. In the present research, we examine the role of more diffuse affective states (i.e., moods) and determine whether they might influence implicitly measured attitudes and stereotypes for reasons apart from their content relevance or irrelevance. We also explored whether this influence stems from changes in automatic processing or from changes in controlled processing via the process–dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991). Although no research to date has directly explored whether mood regulates expression of implicitly measured stereotypes and attitudes, two prominent approaches to affect and cognition converge on the idea that people in negative moods might be less likely than those in positive moods to express them (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Schwarz & Clore, 2007). But this same result might emerge from two rather different models of how mood interacts with controlled and automatic processing. This result may occur because negative moods increase controlled processing or because negative moods decrease automatic processing. The first possibility assumes that negative affect, as compared to positive affect, signals a problematic environment, whereupon controlled, data-driven processing is engaged (e.g., Bless & Schwarz, 1999; Schwarz & Clore, 2007). In this view, negative, as compared to positive, moods will constrain attention to the information at hand and focus processing on task or goal-relevant information; this in turn should prevent automatically activated attitudes and stereotypes from informing responses. From this perspective, then, the role of affect is to regulate controlled processing rather than automatic processing. Consistent with this perspective, many affect–cognition models propose that negative affect, compared to positive affect, is associated with greater systematic, data-driven processing (Schwarz, 2001), accommodation processes (i.e., avoiding mistakes, conserving input; Fiedler, 2001), and effortful processing (Petty, Fabrigar, & Wegener, 2003). The second possibility is that affect signals the value of automatic processing rather than the need for increased controlled processing. In this view, negative mood, in contrast to positive mood, would convey negative value on automatic processing, reducing the automatic activation and consequent expression of ready-made responses such as attitudes and stereotypes, and have no effect on controlled processing. If so, then the role of affect is to regulate automatic processing rather than controlled processing (e.g., Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Clore et al., 2001). Results consistent with this model come from research showing that people in negative moods were less likely than those in positive moods to use routine or automatic perceptual (Gasper & Clore, 2002) and information-processing (Storbeck & Clore, 2005) styles. 0022-1031/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.01.007 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.R. Huntsinger). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 560–566