Mood and the correction of positive versus negative stereotypes.

The present research examined the effects of sadness on the correction of social stereotypes. Participants who either were not induced to feel sad were asked to form an impression of a single individual who belonged to a group that had either stereotypically positive or negative implications. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that sad people corrected for their negative, but not for their positive stereotypes. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this asymmetry was not due to stereotype valence per se but to whether the stereotype was perceived as an inappropriate basis for judgment. A model is presented that suggests that sad people do not simply ignore category-based information, but rather correct for their stereotypes only when they are perceived as inappropriate, which tends to be more often the case if the stereotype is negative than if it is positive. The implications of the present results for 4 extant models of mood and information processing are discussed.

Perceiver threat in social interactions with stigmatized others.

The extent to which stigmatized interaction partners engender perceivers' threat reactions (i.e., stigma-threat hypothesis) was examined. Experiments 1 and 2 included the manipulation of stigma using facial birthmarks. Experiment 3 included manipulations of race and socioeconomic status. Threat responses were measured physiologically, behaviorally, and subjectively. Perceivers interacting with stigmatized partners exhibited cardiovascular reactivity consistent with threat and poorer performance compared with participants interacting with nonstigmatized partners, who exhibited challenge reactivity. In Experiment 3, intergroup contact moderated physiological reactivity such that participants who reported more contact with Black persons exhibited less physiological threat when interacting with them. These results support the stigma-threat hypothesis and suggest the utility of a biopsychosocial approach to the study of stigma and related constructs.

Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity.

Three studies examined perceptions of the entitativity of groups. In Study 1 (U.S.) and Study 2 (Poland), participants rated a sample of 40 groups on 8 properties of groups (e.g., size, duration, group member similarity) and perceived entitativity. Participants also completed a sorting task in which they sorted the groups according to their subjective perceptions of group similarity. Correlational and regression analyses were used to determine the group properties most strongly related to entitativity. Clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses in both studies identified 4 general types of groups (intimacy groups, task groups, social categories, and loose associations). In Study 3, participants rated the properties of groups to which they personally belonged. Study 3 replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 and demonstrated that participants most strongly valued membership in groups that were perceived as high in entitativity.