European Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 24, 45-62 (1994) Negative affect and social judgment: the differential impact of anger and sadness GALEN V. BODENHAUSEN Michigan State University LORI A. SHEPPARD Michigan State University and GEOFFREY P. KRAMER Indiana University — Kokomo Abstract The overwhelming majority of research on affect and social information processing has focused on the judgments and memories of people in good or bad moods rather than examining more specific kinds of emotional experience within the broad categories of positive and negative affect. Are all varieties of negative affect alike in their impact on social perception? Three experiments were conducted to examine the possibility that different kinds of negative affect (in this case, anger and sadness) can have very different kinds of effects on social information processing. Experiment 1 showed that angry subjects rendered more stereotypic judgments in a social perception task than did sad subjects, who did not differ from neutral mood subjects. Experiments 2 and 3 similarly revealed a greater reliance upon heuristic cues in a persuasion situation among angry subjects. Specifically, their level of agreement with unpopular positions was guided more by the credibility of the person advocating the position. These findings are discussed in terms of the impact of emotional experience on social information- processing strategie INTRODUCTION Recent research addressing the impact of affect on social perception and memory has tended to focus on the effects of global mood rather than more specific kinds Addressee for correspondence: Galen V. Bodenhausen, Department of Psychology, Michigan State Univer- Research Building, East Lansing, M1 48824-1117, U.S.A. ritten while the first author was a Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg and at ZUMA, Mannheim, Germany: the support of these institutions is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks fended to Herbert Bless, Gerd Bohner, Michael Conway. Norbert Schwarz, Bob Sinclair, Fritz Strack, and Michaela Wanke for helpful suggestions concerning this research 0046-2772/94/010045-18$14.00 Received 27 August 1992 © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons. Lid. Accepted I March 199346 G. V. Bodenhausen et al. of emotional experiences. The assumption inherent in this approach is that the overall valence of affective experience is the variable of overriding importance in determining the effects of affect on cognition. Presumably, bad moods are expected to have similar effects, regardless of whether they are characterized primarily by sadness, anger, anxiety, guilt, or some other negative emotion. The term ‘mood’ is used by some theorists to refer to diffuse affective states often having antecedents or referents that are unclear to the person experiencing the mood. Emotion terms such as ‘anger’ or ‘sadness’ have more focus and presumably arise from appraisals of specific actual or contemplated states of the world (e.g. Ortony, Clore and Collins, 1988; Smith and Lazarus, 1990). To obtain a richer understanding of the impact of affect on cognition, it may ultimately prove to be necessary for researchers to look beyond the global mood and examine the effects of more discrete kinds of emotional exper- ience (cf. Eagly and Chaiken, 1993), The research to be reported examined this possibility in the realm of negative affect by comparing the effects of anger and sadness on social perception. There are several reasons to suspect that anger and sadness may have different kinds of effects on cognitive processes. The two types of negative affect show marked differences in their physiological manifestations, and they appear to be mediated by different elements of the limbic system. Anger, which primarily involves activity in the amygdala, is associated with an increase in pulse, blood pressure, and secretion of epinephrine; sadness, which primarily involves activation in the hippocampus, does not produce comparable physiological effects (see Henry, 1986). These differ- ences are reflected in subjective experience of bodily states, in that angry people report experiencing symptoms of arousal (e.g. perceptions of greater cardiac activity, a sense of restlessness, etc.) while sad people do not (Shields, 1984). To the extent that the physiological concomitants of emotional experience play any direct or indir- ect role in producing the effects of affect on cognition, anger and sadness may have very different kinds of impact (for evidence linking physiological states to patterns of social judgment and memory, see Bodenhausen (1990) Clark (1982) and Wilder (1993)). The literature on the effects of affect on social judgments has emphasized cognitive and motivational theoretical accounts rather than ones rooted more directly in phy- siological mechanisms such as arousal or other neuroendocrine phenomena. It is interesting to consider whether the logic of these accounts would imply any differences in the effects of anger versus sadness on social perception. Two theoretical issues will be considered. First we will consider accounts for the mood congruency effect in judgment, then we will turn to research linking affective states to differences in information-processing strategies. MOOD CONGRUENCY PROCESSES The mood congruency effect refers to the tendency for people to render judgments that are biased in the direction of a prevailing mood state. Theoretical accounts of this effect emphasize the role of affect-laden concepts within the structure of associative memory (e.g. Bower, 1991; Isen, 1987). According to these models, affect ‘primes’ or activates concepts in memory that are associated (semantically or episodi- cally) with the affective state. These concepts may cue the retrieval from memoryNegative affect and social judgment 47 of specific information relevant to the judgment, or they may be used in the interpre- tation of ambiguous evidence relevant to the judgment. The net impact of these processes is the generation of a judgment that is biased in the direction of the valence of the prevailing mood (see Bower, 1991; Forgas and Moylan, 1987). If one assumes that negative concepts are interassociated in semantic memory, it becomes difficult to generate a compelling theoretical rationale for systematic differences between the effects of anger and sadness within these models of the mood congruency effect. Both anger and sadness would be expected to activate negative concepts, and both should therefore produce a tendency toward more negative judgments, relative to the judgments of those experiencing neutral or positive emotional states. A different explanation for the mood congruency effect has been offered by Schwarz and Clore (1983, 1988). They propose that such effects may have little to do with memory processes, but instead may arise more directly from the use of mood as informational input in the judgment process. When asked to make an evaluative judgment, people may ask themselves, ‘How do I feel about it” and use their mood ‘as one obvious gauge, provided that they interpret their momentary feelings as being at least partly a reaction to the object to be evaluated. Thus, according to this view, a misattribution process occurs in which people mistake their current mood (whatever its actual origins) for a reaction to a to-be-judged stimulus. When subtly reminded that their current mood is in fact based on something other than a reaction to the object of judgment, people no longer show a mood congruency effect (Schwarz and Clore, 1983), Thus, this mood-as-information effect may be limited to more diffuse kinds of affective experience. Even if the anger or sadness being experienced is sufficiently diffuse, the subjective reaction is negative in either case and should translate into a more negative appraisal of the target to be judged. AFFECT AND COGNITIVE STRATEGIES Another theoretical approach to the affect-cognition interface has emphasized the role of mood or emotion in the generation of cognitive strategies for processing evidence relevant to a social judgment (Forgas, 1989; Isen and Means, 1983; Kuhl, 1983; Schwarz, 1990). Although there are undoubtedly many different ways of classi- fying or identifying the information-processing strategies of the social perceiver (¢/- Forgas, 1992a,b), most attention has focused on the distinction between thorough, systematic, detail-oriented processing on one hand and cursory, heuristic, and global processing on the other (see Chaiken, Liberman and Eagly, 1989: Fiske and Neuberg, 1990; Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). Within this theoretical approach, it has been hypothesized that different emotional states may predispose social perceivers to be more or less systematic in their information-processing strategies. Much of the research in this vein has focused on happiness, which has been associated with more heuristic styles of thinking. Happy people appear to rely more on source cues and less on systematic assessment of message quality in persuasion situations (Mackie and Worth, 1989, 1991; Schwarz, Bless and Bohner, 1991; Worth and Mackie, 1987), to rely on stereotypes to a greater extent in determining the validity of allegations of guilt (Bodenhausen, 1993; Bodenhausen, Kramer and Siisser, in press), and to48 — G. V. Bodenhausen et al. approach problem-solving tasks in a generally more heuristic fashion (Schwarz and Bless, 1991; for a comprehensive review, see Sinclair and Mark, 1992). These findings have been interpreted as showing that happy people have less motivation for systema- tic thought (in the absence of personal consequences) or that they have less cognitive capacity for such thought (see Schwarz et al., 1991), But what about negative affect? A growing body of research has addressed the question of how sadness is related to information processing. In contrast to happy people, sad or mildly depressed people seem to use more systematic, detail-oriented strategies in social perception. For instance, they are more sensitive to covariation information (Weary, 1990), they show less halo bias in performance appraisals (Sinclair, 1988), and they appear to engage in a more thoughtful cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to help someone in need (Schaller and Cialdini, 1990). Schwarz (1990) has provided an intriguing interpretation of this phenomenon. He argued that sadness, because itis associated with problematic life circumstances, is likely to trigger cognitive strate- gies that are most likely to afford effective problem solving. By thinking more systema- tically and thoroughly about the social environment, sad people stand the best chance of finding solutions for their life problems. It may also be that sad people prefer to become cognitively absorbed in information-processing tasks as a means of dis- tracting themselves from thoughts about the source of their unhappiness (cf. Wenzlaff, Wegner and Roper, 1988). While the extant empirical literature clearly suggests marked differences in the processing strategies of sad and happy people, it is largely silent on the issue of anger and information-processing strategies. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that being very angry will be associated with thoughtful, systematic information processing. On the contrary, angry people seem prone to impulsive, ill-considered judgment and action (Kuhl, 1983). In certain legal contexts, we say a person was ‘blind’ with rage and therefore unlikely to have engaged in thoughtful (albeit malicious) premedi- tation of a crime. If adaptational or evolutionary pressures have produced a tendency for sad people to think more systematically in the interest of remediating their prob- lems, perhaps people have developed a tendency to react quickly and heuristically when angry for similarly adaptive reasons. Anger typically arises in agonistic contexts, which often require a quick response that can be invoked without extensive contem- plation of the various alternative courses of action (cf. Scott, 1980). Unlike sadness, anger is likely to be associated with more immediate threat or insult. It may also be that when one is angry, it is difficult to concentrate on other matters. This, too, may have its adaptive advantages. Like fear (which bears many neuroendocrine similarities to anger, but not to sadness), anger seems to be disruptive to coordinated cerebral activity (Hebb, 1946). If so, angry people may have a reduced capacity for systematic thinking. These considerations lead to a predicted difference in the judgments of sad versus angry people: whereas sad people seem to process social information more systematically, angry people may react more impulsively and less deliberately. In sum, two different predictions seem reasonable on a priori grounds concerning the comparative effects of anger and sadness on social judgments, From the stand- point of research and theory on mood congruency effects, there is little basis forNegative affect and social judgment 49 expecting any differences between the two affective states'. From the standpoint of research and theory on emotion and social information-processing strategies, how- ever, it was expected that angry and sad subjects may differ in their tendency to rely on global, heuristic strategies for generating a quick response requiring less effort and fewer cognitive resources. Specifically, angry people may show this prefer- ence for heuristic strategies, while sad people may be prone to be detail-oriented and more thorough in their processing. To test these issues empirically, three exper- iments were conducted in which sad, angry, and neutral mood subjects were asked to render evaluative judgments based on a set of presented information. In addition to the specific, relatively detailed information that was relevant to the judgment, subjects were also provided with simple heuristic cues that could provide a basis for responding to the judgment task. Of focal concern were two questions: (1) will the judgments of both angry and sad people tend to be evaluatively more negative than those of neutral mood subjects? and (2) will the judgments of angry subjects reflect greater use of simple response heuristics, relative to both sad and neutral mood subjects? EXPERIMENT 1 Stereotypes can be viewed as judgmental heuristics that are relied upon by social perceivers whenever they lack the ability or the inclination to think more extensively about the unique personal qualities of outgroup members (Bodenhausen, 1988; 1990; Bodenhausen and Lichtenstein, 1987; Bodenhausen and Wyer, 1985; Chaiken et al., 1989). Therefore, if a given emotional state is likely to engender heuristic styles of thinking, this should include stereotypic thinking. In a series of four experiments, Bodenhausen ev al. (in press) found that happiness had precisely this effect: people who had been made happy prior to engaging in a social judgment task rendered more stereotypic judgments. Thus, the paradigm they employed seemed especially useful in examining possible differences in processing strategies between angry and sad people. In the first experiment, subjects were induced to feel either angry, sad, or a neutral mood. Then, as part of an ostensibly unrelated experiment, they were 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 approximately half of the cases, the accused student was identified as a member of a social group that is stereotypically associated with the type of offence alleged in the case. Otherwise, the case evidence was identical It was expected that angry subjects (but not sad ones) would show greater use of the stereotype in making judgments about the case ' It should be noted that Bower (1980) did propose that discrete emotional states may each be associated with different subsets of information in memory. That is, there is no reason to assume that all negatively valenced information is interassociated. However. even though different negative emotions may be associ- ated with different cognitive content, such content is still likely to be generally negative in tone. Hence, it would be difficult for “priming” models of mood effects, especially as they have been developed in the social cognition literature, to account for differential impact of different negative emotions without adding new assumptions to these frameworks.50 G. V. Bodenhausen et al. Method Subjects and design One hundred and thirty-five subjects participated in groups of approximately eight. All subjects were introductory psychology students who participated in fulfilment of a course requirement. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of six conditions defined by a 3 (affect: angry, sad, or neutral) x 2 (stereotype: present versus absent) between-subjects factorial design. Procedure and materials Mood induction Subjects were recruited for a study ostensibly concerned with mood and memory. Upon arrival at the laboratory, they were greeted by an experimenter who explained that, because the mood study was so short, they would also be doing an unrelated experiment ‘if the experimenter shows up’. The first experimenter then explained the basic nature of the mood study, which involved reminiscing and writing about life events. In angry conditions, subjects were asked to vividly recall an episode that had made them feel very angry, and to describe in detail how the event occurred. In the sad conditions, the same instructions were used, except that the to-be-recalled event was sad rather than angry. These affect induction procedures were adapted from those used successfully by Strack, Schwarz and Gschneidinger (1985). In the neutral mood condition, subjects were simply asked to recall and describe in detail the mundane events of the previous day’. In each case, subjects were given 12 minutes to complete the task, which they worked on in private cubicles. Upon com- pletion of the memory task, the experimenter collected their forms and left them in the charge of a second experimenter who had arrived in the meantime. Social perception task The second experimenter (who distributed a second consent form) described his or her study as being concerned with the issue of legal socializa- tion, particularly the issue of how college students react to the misbehaviour of their peers. The actual social perception task was the same one used previously by Bodenhausen (1990, Experiment 2). In this task, subjects are asked to take the role of a member of a peer judicial review board, to read a case of alleged misconduct, and to render judgments about the case. Each case consisted of approximately five to six sentences of specific evidence, mixed in its overall implications. Two cases were constructed, one involving assault and one involving cheating on an examin- ation. For half of the assault cases, the student defendant was given an obviously Hispanic name (‘Juan Garcia’), and for the remainder he was given a non-Hispanic name (‘John Garner’). For half of the cheating cases, the student defendant’s name was followed by the phrase, ‘a well known track-and-field athlete on campus’, whereas in the remainder, this phrase was omitted. Previous research within the same subject population demonstrated that male Hispanics were stereotypically viewed as aggress- ive, while student athletes were seen as being prone to cheating in their academic work (Bodenhausen, 1990). Dependent measures Immediately prior to reading the case, subjects were asked ? The neutral/control group subjects in this experiment were the same as those in Bodenhausen er al. (in press, Experiment 1). Data from these subjects were collected during the same experimental sessions (and from the same subject population) as the angry and sad conditions.Negative affect and social judgment 51 to fill out a short demographic/psychological profile ostensibly being used to docu- ment sample characteristics. In addition to standard demographic items, the question- naire contained a series of self-ratings in which respondents were asked to rate how well each of several adjectives described them at the moment. Each rating was made by circling a number on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 7 (extremely). Embedded within numerous fillers were affect terms (‘sad’ and ‘irritated’) intended to gauge the effectiveness of the mood induction. The term ‘irritated’ was chosen instead of ‘angry” because in pilot work, ‘angry’ proved to be too reactive a term, producing floor effects in self-ratings. Immediately after reading the case they had been given, subjects were asked to fill out a brief questionnaire outlining their reactions to the case. Of foremost interest was their rating of the likelihood of the student defendant’s guilt. This rating was made on an 11-point scale ranging from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). After completion of a probe for suspicions, subjects were debriefed and dismissed’. Results and discussion Manipulation check Effectiveness of the mood manipulation was assessed by a series of planned compari- sons in which self-ratings of sadness and irritation were compared across the angry, sad and neutral conditions. As expected, subjects in the angry condition rated them- selves as being more irritated than did subjects in the neutral control condition (Ms = 1.98 versus 1.33, p < 0.05), but sad subjects did not differ from the control condition on this rating. Conversely, subjects in the sad condition rated themselves as significantly more sad than did subjects in the neutral control condition (Ms = 2.48 versus 1.62, p < 0.005), but angry subjects did not differ from the neutral condition on this rating. Thus, the manipulations were successful in inducing the intended, differentially negative affective states. Perceived guilt Because the results for the two cases (i.¢. assault and cheating) were comparable (case did not interact with any of the independent variables), the data were collapsed across this replication factor. Mean ratings of defendant guilt are depicted in Figure 1 as a function of subjects’ affective state and whether or not a stereotype had been activated. It is clear from an inspection of the figure that stereotype activation had no discernible impact on subjects’ guilt judgments when they were in either a sad or a neutral mood (Fs < 1), but there was a marked increase in the perceived guilt of stereotyped targets on the part of angry subjects. F(1, 38) = 9.21, p< 0.005. The interaction of stereotype activation and affect condition was reliable, F(2, 129) = 3.83, p < 0.025. This pattern of guilt judgments is noteworthy in several respects. First, it provides empirical corroboration for the idea that anger is associated with more heuristic information processing. Angry subjects clearly made greater use of their stereotypic * None of the subjects demonstrated any insight into experimental hypotheses during the probe for suspi- cions, although one subject did chide the researchers for failing to consider the possible contaminating effects of the “first” experiment on the ‘second’ one.52. G. V. Bodenhausen et al. 154 Stereotype 7 G7 Present BB Absent Guilt Rating a ANGRY SAD NEUTRAL Affect Condition Figure 1. Mean judgments of guilt as a function of affect condition and stereotype activation beliefs than did sad subjects. Thus, it is evident that different kinds of negative affect can indeed have different kinds of effects on social information processing. Interestingly, the angry subjects in the first experiment displayed exactly the same pattern of judgments as those of happy subjects who considered identical cases in a previous set of experiments (Bodenhausen er al., in press). That happiness and anger can have similar effects on social judgment while sadness and anger have quite different effects underscores the importance of looking beyond affect valence per se to the particular effects that are likely to accompany specific kinds of emotional experience. ‘These findings are also interesting in light of traditional views linking prejudice and stereotyping to emotional experience. While negative affect has often been postu- lated to be associated with increases in prejudice and stereotyping (c.g. Dollard, Miller, Doob, Mowrer and Sears, 1939; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Rosen- blatt, Veeder, Kirkland and Lyon, 1990; Stephan and Stephan, 1985), the available empirical evidence has focused almost exclusively on anger/frustration and anxiety. The data from Experiment I show that anger is associated with greater use of heuristic cues in judgment, while Baron, Inman, Kao and Logan (1992) have shown that anxious people use more heuristic strategies for social information processing. Based on the literature reviewed earlier, it appears that sad people, in contrast, seem to prefer more systematic strategies for social judgment. Correspondingly, we found no evidence of increased use of stereotypes in social judgment on the part of sad people, nor have previous studies of which we are aware. On the other hand, Esses, Haddock and Zanna (in press) have reported a study in which people were made sad (via the Velton procedure or via sad music) and then asked to list characteristics they consider to be descriptive of typical members of various social groups. These characteristics were then rated in terms of theirNegative affect and social judgment 53 valence (positive or negative) and the proportion of people in the group possessing the characteristic. A composite stereotype score was computed for each group for each subject by multiplying the proportion and valence ratings for each characteristic, summing this product across all characteristics listed by the subject for the group, and then dividing this sum by the number of characteristics listed for the group. For some of the social groups being described, it was the case that those in a negative mood had more negative stereotype composite scores than those in a neutral mood condition. This pattern was interpreted as reflecting an increased use of negative categories in the interpretation of the evaluative meaning of specific characteristics. Such a process would be directly in line with theoretical accounts for the mood congruency effect outlined earlier. Note, however, that subjects were engaging in a free association task in which they listed and interpreted the attributes of social groups. Under these conditions we might expect the sort of ‘mood priming’ described by mood congruency researchers to be most evident, as the task involves a fairly unconstrained search of associative memory (for similar conclusions, see Fiedler (1991) and Forgas (1992c)). In the present study, however, we found no evidence that sad people show a mood congruency effect in judgments of specific members of outgroups. In our task, negative affect may primarily have its effects via its impact on processing strategies, whereas in the task used by Esses ef al., its effects may be mediated by mood-based priming of negative concepts in memory (fora systematic review of the different processes through which mood affects social judgment, see Forgas, 1992a,b)). EXPERIMENT 2 If anger leads to an increased reliance on heuristic cues in social judgment, but sadness leads to more systematic processing, 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. Experiments 2 and 3 were undertaken to determine whether the findings of the first experiment would generalize to persuasion situations. Reactions to persuasive communications represent a particularly apt arena for investigating the impact of affect on social information processing because the dominant theoretical perspectives in contemporary persuasion research strongly emphasize the distinction between responses based on simple, relatively superficial cues and responses based on a thoughtful analysis of the content of a persuasive appeal (Chaiken, 1980, 1987; Petty and Cacioppo. 1986). According to these theoretical approaches, reliance on superfi- cial cues will be greater when motivation or ability to engage in more effortful process- ing of the message is constrained. To the extent that affective states affect processing motivation or capacity as implied by recent theories of affect and cognition, the tendency to use heuristic cues in a persuasive situation should be related to one’s momentary affective state. Previous research has already documented a tendency for happy people to be less affected by variations in argument quality and more affected by simple cues indicating the probable validity of the communication (Mackie and Worth, 1989, 1991; Worth and Mackie, 1987) and sad people have been shown to be more attuned to the quality of presented arguments (Bless, Bohner, Schwarz and Strack, 1990), in line with our theorizing. However, it is still unclear what kind54 G. V. Bodenhausen etal. of use sad people make of heuristic cues, and the effects of anger on reactions to persuasive appeals have been largely unexplored. The present research was intended to provide a direct comparison of the effects of heuristic cues on angry versus sad recipients of persuasive messages. Since the pioneering research of Hovland and Weiss (1951), it has been repeatedly documented that under many circumstances, people agree more with a source who is reputedly high in credibility, compared to a less credible source who advances identical arguments (for reviews, see Eagly and Chaiken, 1993; Hass, 1981; McGuire, 1985). The two principal elements of source credibility are expertise (e.g. Kelman and Hovland, 1953) and trustworthiness (e.g. Walster, Aronson and Abrahams, 1966). In Experiment 2, we examined the impact of variations in the expertise of a communicator on the reactions of sad, angry, and neutral mood subjects to a persuasive appeal, while in Experiment 3, we examined the impact of variations in communicator trustworthiness. Method Subjects and design Fighty-three subjects participated in groups of approximately eight. All subjects were introductory psychology students who participated in fulfilment of a course requirement. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of six conditions defined by a3 (affect: angry, sad, or neutral) x 2 (source expertise: high versus low) between- subjects factorial design. Procedure and materials Affect induction The same basic procedure successfully used to induce affective states in Experiment 1 was used again for Experiment 2. Under the guise of two short, unrelated studies, subjects first completed a 12-minute reminiscence task designed to create feelings of anger, sadness, or no mood in particular, after which the persuasion task commenced. Persuasion task The ‘second’ experiment was described to participants as a study of college students’ opinions on a range of issues important to them. Specifically, they were told that the researchers were interested in getting their reactions to various essays outlining possible new social policies. In reality, everyone was given an essay ‘on the same topic, namely raising the legal driving age from 16 to 18, The message consisted of six arguments for the advocated position, presented on the same page in the form of a coherent essay. The essay was attributed to one of two possible sources. Under high expertise conditions, the message was said to have been produced by ‘a group of transportation policy experts at Princeton University’. Under low expertise conditions, the essay was attributed to ‘a group of students at Sinclair Community College in New Jersey’. These two sources had been pretested and found to differ substantially in their perceived expertise in this topic domain, After perusing the essay, subjects were asked to report the extent of their agreement with the advo- cated position on an 11-point scale (0 = strongly disagree, 10 = strongly agree). Then they were asked to complete a thought-listing measure in which they were asked to retrospectively report any and all thoughts that occurred to them as theyNegative affect and social judgment $5 read the persuasive appeal. After listing their thoughts, participants then coded them in terms of whether they were favourable, unfavourable, or neutral with respect to the advocated position. Finally, subjects were probed for suspicions and provided with an educational debriefing. Results and discussion Based on the results of our stereotyping study, we expected that the reactions of angry subjects to a persuasive appeal would be strongly influenced by the presence of a simple source cue, in this case expertise, while the reactions of sad people would not be appreciably affected by this cue. Data relevant to this prediction are provided in Table 1, which shows subjects’ mean agreement with the advocated position as a function of their emotional state and the communicator’s level of exper- tise. In an analysis of variance (ANOVA) on agreement scores, the overall interaction of source expertise and affective state was statistically reliable, F(2,77) = 4.09, p<0.025. The simple effects of the expertise cue within each affect condition are of particular interest. While neutral mood subjects showed a trend to agree more with the expert source, this difference did not prove to be statistically significant. Angry subjects, however, showed a strong and significant tendency to agree with the high-expertise source to a greater extent, Interestingly, sad subjects actually showed a trend toward agreeing more with the Jow expertise source, although this reversal did not prove to be statistically significant, Table 1. Mean agreement with advocated position as a function of affect condition and source expertise (Experiment 1) Source expertise Affect condition Low High Difference p Angry 2.00 467 2.67 0.01 Sad 3.86 2.69 =117 0.15 Neutral 2.36 3.79 143 0.20 Overall, the data in Table 1 indicate that subjects showed little inclination to agree with the advocated position, and thought-listing data revealed a preponderance of counterarguing. At least two-thirds of all listed thoughts were negative in all conditions except for the angry-expert condition, in which only 54 per cent of the thoughts were negative, on average. However, there were no significant effects in an ANOVA on thought-listing measures. The results obtained in the second experiment nicely corroborate the implications of the first study using a completely different social information-processing task and a very different kind of heuristic cue. Anger appears to have very different effects from sadness, in this case promoting the greater use of a simple heuristic cue. Certainly there is no general mood congruency pattern evident among the judg- ments of angry or sad subjects. One intriguing aspect of the data was the apparent trend for sad subjects to use the expertise cue in a reversed fashion. That is, they appeared to agree more with the low expertise source. However, this finding did not reach conventional levels of significance. In order to determine whether this56 GV. Bodenhausen et al. is a phenomenon worth speculating about, a third study was undertaken to examine the generality of the findings reported in Experiment 2. EXPERIMENT 3 In the final experiment, we again examined the use of source cues in a persuasion situation among angry, sad, and neural mood subjects. However, this time we manipu- lated the source’s trustworthiness. When communicators advocate a policy that serves their own interests and agendas, they are perceived as less trustworthy and often have less persuasive impact than when they advocate a position that is unexpected or at odds with their own interests (e.g. Eagly, Wood, and Chaiken, 1978; Walster et al. 1966). The apparent trustworthiness of the communicator provides another basis for a quick, heuristic response to a persuasive appeal that does not necessitate thoughtful processing of message content. In the third experiment we once again induced angry, sad, or neutral moods among recipients of persuasive appeals, and systematically manipulated the apparent trustworthiness of the communicator by varying the extent to which the advocated position served the communicator’s vested interests. Method Subjects and design Ninety-one subjects participated in groups of approximately eight. All subjects were introductory psychology students who participated in fulfilment of a course require- ment. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of six conditions defined by a 3 (affect: angry, sad, or neutral) x 2 (source trustworthiness: high versus low) Detween-subjects factorial design. Procedure and materials Affect induction The same method used to induce affective states in the previous experiments was used again. Persuasion task The ‘second’ experiment was again described to participants as a study of college students’ opinions on a range of issues important to them. In this study, everyone was given an essay on the banning of meat in University residence hall dining rooms at breakfast and lunch. The message consisted of five arguments for the advocated position, presented on the same page in the form of a coherent essay. The essay was attributed to one of two possible sources. Under high trust- worthiness conditions, the message was said to have been produced by ‘the Student Government League, which actively promotes the interests and welfare of all college students’. Under low trustworthiness conditions, the essay was attributed to ‘the Student Vegetarian League, which actively promotes vegetarianism and animal rights’. In pretesting, these two sources were found to differ substantially in their perceived trustworthiness for this topic. After reading the essays, subjects were asked to report the extent of their agreement with the advocated position on an 11-point scale (0 = strongly disagree, 10 = strongly agree). Then they were asked to completeNegative affect and social judgment 57 a thought-listing measure in which they were asked to report any and all thoughts that occurred to them as they read the persuasive appeal. After listing their thoughts, participants then coded them in terms of whether they were favourable, unfavourable, or neutral with respect to the advocated position. Finally, subjects were probed for suspicions and provided with an educational debriefing. Results and discussion Mean ratings of agreement with the advocated position are presented in Table 2 as a function of subjects’ affective state and the communicator’s level of trustworthi- ness. As in Experiment 2, neutral mood subjects showed only a nonsignificant trend toward greater agreement with the high credibility source. Angry subjects, however, showed a marked and statistically reliable pattern of agreeing with the trustworthy source to @ greater extent than the source low in trustworthiness. And once again, sad subjects showed a tendency toward the reversed pattern. Although the difference between sad subjects’ levels of agreement with the high versus low trustworthy sources was not significant, it is clear that those in a sad mood did disagree significantly more with the trustworthy source compared to those in an angry or neutral mood. Overall, the interaction of affect condition and source trustworthiness was nearly significant, F(2,85) = 2.82, p < 0.06. ‘Table 2. Mean agreement with advocated position as a function of affect condition and source trustworthiness (Experiment 3) Source trustworthiness Affect condition Low High Difference P Angry 172 3.94 2.22 0.04 Sad 2.42 1.47 -0.95 0.25 Neutral 2.40 3.93 1.53 0.13, As in Experiment 2, thought-listing measures were not significantly affected by the experimental manipulations, and they revealed a high proportion of negative thoughts in all conditions (M = 0.75). Clearly, subjects did not find the presented arguments for banning meat from residence hall dining rooms particularly compell- ing. But when these arguments were presented by an apparently trustworthy source, it was only the sad subjects who failed to show elevations in agreement levels. Instead, they showed the very lowest levels of agreement under this condition. GENERAL DISCUSSION Researchers have recently made great strides toward increasing our understanding of the role of affect in social cognition. The present studies contribute to this literature in several respects, each of which will be discussed in turn. Going beyond valence in research on affect and cognition While it has been natural, and indeed fundamental, for researchers to make compari- sons between the effects of good and bad moods, the present research highlights58 G. V. Bodenhausen et al. the importance of looking beyond the valence of the social perceiver’s affective state per se and beginning to explore the effects of discrete kinds of emotional experience on information processing. In all three studies, angry and sad subjects showed clear differences in the use they made of simple heuristic cues in the process of generating evaluations of social information. Anger, sadness, anxiety, guilt, and many other negative emotional states may each produce their own behavioural and judgmental tendencies, and the same may be true for various positive states such as joy, hope, and pride. Consequently, it will be necessary for theoretical developments occurring at the interface of affect and cognition to begin to explicitly account for the specific effects of discrete emotions (cf. Bodenhausen, 1993). With this in mind, it becomes clear that a straightforward mood congruency model of affect and cognition will be inadequate to capture the full richness of the impact of affect on social thought and judgment. Because mood congruency perspectives, at least as they are currently articulated, cannot easily account for variations in patterns of judgment across different varieties of negative affect, they cannot account for the overall pattern evident in these three studies. Recent theoretical developments have indeed begun to incorporate multiple processes through which affect impinges on social cognition (e.g. Forgas, 1992b), and it will become an important issue for further exploration to uncover the conditions under which simple mood congruency effects do and do not obtain, versus conditions in which more emotion specific effects may be evident. The present data fit well within an adaptationist framework arguing that emotions are associated with patterns of thought and action that serve the needs of the types of situations in which the motions typically arise (e.g. Schwarz, 1990; Smith and Lazarus, 1990). In order to make systematic progress in understanding the influence of emotional experience on social information processing, it will be increasingly important for researchers to look beyond mood valence. This will require the development of emo- tion typologies that explicitly identify the consequential dimensions on which differ- ent emotional states differ. As suggested elsewhere (Bodenhausen, 1993), emotions may differ in their autonomic manifestations, the extent to which they produce rumi- nation or distraction, their evolutionary connections to mental and behavioural pro- clivities, and their tendencies to endure across time, as well as in many other ways. It remains for future research to delineate the relative importance of these differences in accounting for the differential effects of emotional states on perception, judgment, and action. Anger and social information processing Centuries ago, Virgil wrote that ‘anger carries the mind away’, yet there has been relatively little empirical documentation of the thought processes of angry minds, Itis certainly an issue of considerable practical importance to understand the effects of being angry on one’s response to persuasive appeals or to members of stigmatized social groups. The present research indicates that angry people are significantly more likely to rely on simple cues in reacting to social stimuli. Their judgements of accused miscreants were more affected by social stereotypes, and their level of agreement with unpopular positions was guided more by the apparent credibility of the person advocating the position. Why should this be so? It was argued that anger arises in situations involving physical and/or psychological harm, and as such, it may beNegative affect and social judgment 59 most adaptive to respond relatively quickly. If an apparently diagnostic cue provides a basis for a quick response, angry people appear to opt for this strategy to a greater extent than those in a neutral mood. This may be true regardless of whether the task requiring a response is related to the source of the anger (termed integral affect by Bodenhausen, 1993) or irrelevant to it (termed incidental affect). The present studies investigated the case of incidental affect, in that the social perception tasks employed in the experiments were unrelated to the sources of subjects’ anger. It is unclear whether angry subjects’ greater reliance on simple heuristic cues is due to reduced motivation for thoughtful analysis of judgment-relevant information, reduced capacity for such analysis, or something else, and it may prove difficult to disentangle the various possibilities (cf. Schwarz et al. 1991), Nevertheless, it will be useful for future research on the effects of anger on social judgment to begin to document the specific mechanisms producing the greater reliance on heuristic cue evident among angry social perceivers. ‘Sadness and the use of heuristic cues Recent evidence has suggested that, unlike our angry subjects, sad people are more prone to thoughtful, detail-oriented analysis of social information (e.g. Bless er al., 1990; Weary, 1990). However, there has been little in the way of evidence concerning the way(s) sad people make use of heuristic cues in social judgment. We initially expected, in line with earlier research, that sad people may actually make very little use of such global cues, preferring instead to base their reactions on a consideration of the implications of the specific details contained in relevant information. Our data, particularly that of Experiment 3, suggests that something a bit more complex may be going on. It appears that sad people may not disregard source cues entirely in persuasive situations. At least in the cases we examined, they actually appeared to use them in a manner opposite to the way they are used by angry subjects. At the very least, we can say with confidence that sad subjects disagreed more with a highly credible source then did angry or neutral mood subjects. 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