THE RELATION BETWEEN SOCIAL STEREOTYPING AND AFFECT

1996 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

• Project/Area Number: 07610123
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: 教育・社会系心理学
• Research Institution: Aichi University of Education
• Principal Investigator: IKEGAMI Tomoko Aichi University of Education, Department of Psychology, Associate Professor, 教育学部, 助教授 (90191866)
• Project Period (FY): 1995 – 1996
• Keywords: STEREOTYPING / ILLUSORY CORRELATION / MOOD EFFECT / GROUP PERCEPTION / AFFECT

Research Abstract

The present research investigated how positive and negative mood influence upon group perception, using an expectancy-based illusory correlation paradigm. Forty eight undergraduates (12 males, 36 females) served as subjects. The subjects were randomly assigned to one of the three mood conditions. Firstly the subjects participated in a photograph-rating task, where they were exposed to one of the three types of photos (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral) in order to induce good, bad, or neutral mood according to the experimental condition. Then they participated in an ostensibly unrelated second task, where they were shown a series of trait statements about students from one of the four universities including the one they belonged to. They were asked to judge whether or not they would agree with each statement (statement-verification task). The judgment time was measured as an index for the degree of ease with which subjects collated it with their stereotypical knowledge. After that they were given a frequency estimation test where they were asked to rate how many times each statement had appeared. It was shown that good mood speeded up the judgment time in the statement-verification task, whereas bad mood did not. However, the illusory-correlation effect was shown to be amplified either by good or bad mood. In other words, subjects either in a good or bad mood underestimated the frequency of statements that contained non-stereotypical traits compared with stereotypical ones. Considering these results together, it was concluded that good and bad mood might influence differently on the cognitive processes underlying the illusory-correlation effect. Good mood might have powerful influences in encoding of stereotypical events into memory, facilitating the retrieval of them. On the other hand, bad mood should come to play an important role only at retrieval stage. It was suggested that bad mood might restrain the retrieval of non-stereotypical events.