The present article provides an analysis of the attitude construct from the perspective of the Associative-Propositional Evaluation Model (APE Model). It is argued that evaluative responses should be understood in terms of their underlying mental processes: associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by mere activation, independent of subjective truth or falsity, propositional reasoning is concerned with the validation of evaluations and beliefs. Associative processes are claimed to provide the basis for primitive affective reactions; propositional processes are assumed to form the basis for evaluative judgments. Implications of this conceptualization for a variety of questions are discussed, such as automatic features of attitudes, processes of attitude formation and change, attitude representation in memory, context-sensitivity and stability of attitudes, and the difference between personal and cultural evaluations.

Research in the cognitive dissonance tradition has shown that choosing between two equally attractive alternatives leads to more favorable evaluations of chosen as compared to rejected alternatives (spreading-of-alternatives effect). The present research tested associative self-anchoring as an alternative mechanism for post-decisional changes of implicit evaluations. Specifically, we argue that choosing an object results in the creation of an association between the chosen object and the self. By virtue of this association, implicit evaluations of the self tend to transfer to the chosen object, such that implicit evaluations of the chosen object depend on implicit evaluations of the self. Importantly, this mechanism can lead to ownership-related changes in implicit evaluations even in the absence of cognitive dissonance. Results from four experiments provide converging evidence for these assumptions. Implications for a variety of phenomena are discussed, including cognitive dissonance, the mere ownership effect, the endowment effect, and ingroup favoritism.

A central theme in recent research on attitudes is the distinction between deliberate, "explicit" attitudes and automatic, "implicit" attitudes. The present article provides an integrative review of the available evidence on implicit and explicit attitude change that is guided by a distinction between associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by mere activation independent of subjective truth or falsity, propositional reasoning is concerned with the validation of evaluations and beliefs. The proposed associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model makes specific assumptions about the mutual interplay of the 2 processes, implying several mechanisms that lead to symmetric or asymmetric changes in implicit and explicit attitudes. The model integrates a broad range of empirical evidence and implies several new predictions for implicit and explicit attitude change.

Commentators (see records 2006-10465-004, 2006-10465-005, and 2006-10465-006) on B. Gawronski and G. V. Bodenhausen's (2006; see record 2006-10465-003) recently proposed associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model raised a number of interesting conceptual, empirical, and meta-theoretical issues. The authors consider these issues and conclude that (a) the conceptual criticisms raised against the APE model are based on misinterpretations of its basic assumptions, (b) the empirical criticisms are unfounded, as they are inconsistent with the available evidence, and (c) the proposed alternative accounts appear to be less parsimonious and weaker in their predictive power than the APE model. Nevertheless, the commentators offered valuable suggestions for extensions of the APE model, which the authors discuss with respect to their implications for new directions in attitude research.

A central theme in recent research on attitudes is the distinction between deliberate, "explicit" attitudes and automatic, "implicit" attitudes. The present article provides an integrative review of the available evidence on implicit and explicit attitude change that is guided by a distinction between associative and propositional processes. Whereas associative processes are characterized by mere activation independent of subjective truth or falsity, propositional reasoning is concerned with the validation of evaluations and beliefs. The proposed associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model makes specific assumptions about the mutual interplay of the 2 processes, implying several mechanisms that lead to symmetric or asymmetric changes in implicit and explicit attitudes. The model integrates a broad range of empirical evidence and implies several new predictions for implicit and explicit attitude change.

Three studies investigated how inclusion versus exclusion strategies differentially lead to stereotypic decisions. In inclusion strategies, suitable targets are selected from a list of candidates, whereas in exclusion strategies, unsuitable candidates are eliminated. Across 2 separate target domains (Study 1: male and female politicians; Studies 2 and 3: African American and European American basketball players), exclusion strategies, as compared with inclusion strategies, elicited higher levels of both sensitivity stereotyping (i.e., greater difficulty distinguishing among members of stereotyped groups) and criterion stereotyping (i.e., setting different decision thresholds for judging members of different groups; see M. R. Banaji & A. G. Greenwald, 1995). Thus, the strategy used during decision making can influence the final decision via 2 theoretically distinct stereotyping mechanisms.

The article discusses various essays published within the issue, including one by Kurt Hugenberg and Sabine Sczesny on the role of social context in perceiving the affective signals that are present in faces, and another by Nicole Koehler, Gillian Rhodes, Leigh W. Simmons, and Leslie A. Zebrowitz on the role of female fertility status in modulating preferences for males displaying facial cues.

Performance on measures of implicit social cognition has been shown to vary as a function of the momentary accessibility of relevant information. The present research investigated the mechanisms underlying accessibility effects of self-generated information on implicit measures. Results from 3 experiments demonstrate that measures based on response compatibility processes (e.g., Implicit Association Test, affective priming with an evaluative decision task) are influenced by subjective feelings pertaining to the ease of retrieving relevant information from memory, whereas measures based on stimulus compatibility processes (e.g., semantic priming with a lexical-decision task) are influenced by direct knowledge activation in associative memory. These results indicate that the mediating mechanisms underlying context effects on implicit measures can differ as a function of the task even when these tasks show similar effects on a superficial level. Implications for research on implicit social cognition and the ease-of-retrieval effect are discussed.

Analogical inferences can modify people's understanding, but can this occur even when the inferences are unpalatable? We report two experiments suggesting that this is the case. Participants read a source passage on the role and status of gay people in society. Half then read an analogy describing the historical persecution of left-handers. On a subsequent recognition test, the participants who read the analogy were more likely than the control participants to misrecognize analogical inferences as statements explicitly presented, but the two groups did not differ in recognition rates for other kinds of statements. A priori explicit attitudes toward gays did not moderate these findings, although the participants with more positive attitudes toward gays saw the analogy to left-handers as more sound. Our findings demonstrate that analogical inferences can be seamlessly integrated into mental representations of the target domain even when those inferences are unpalatable; in short, resistance to analogy is futile.

Stereotyping is a process through which we come to judge other people and respond to them in terms of their social category memberships, such as their sex or their ethnicity or their age group. Stereotyping can be contrasted with the process of individuation, whereby one considers the unique constellation of attributes that a particular individual possesses. This process does not necessarily involve ignoring people's social category memberships, including their sex or their ethnicity, but it does imply going beyond such factors to look at a broader constellation of characteristics that make that individual unique, and not someone who's functionally interchangeable with other members of his or her category. The 1st step in combating stereotypes is to create awareness about the dangers that they pose for decision making. We also need to have motivation and cognitive capacity because the alternatives to stereotyping are ones that often take more mental effort than stereotypic responses do. Individuation is more work than stereotyping. Stereotypes give us a quick and easy way of responding to the world, which certainly has its usefulness.

Five studies tested the assumptions: (a) that ingroups are habitually used as a standard of comparison for outgroup judgments, and (b) that outgroup judgments are generally contrasted away from a momentary construal of the ingroup. Results generally support these assumptions. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated increased activation levels of ingroup knowledge as a result of corresponding outgroup judgments. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that outgroup judgments depend not only on cognitively accessible outgroup exemplars, but also on accessible ingroup exemplars. Finally, Experiment 5 demonstrated that the impact of accessible ingroup exemplars on outgroup judgments is mediated by changes in the construal of the ingroup, such that: (a) outgroups were judged lower with regard to a given trait the higher participants perceived their ingroup with regard to that trait, and (b) controlling for the effect of ingroup construal attenuated the obtained effects on outgroup judgments.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that perceivers' prejudice and targets' facial expressions bias race categorization in stereotypic directions. Specifically, we hypothesized that racial prejudice would be more strongly associated with a tendency to categorize hostile (but not happy) racially ambiguous faces as African American. We obtained support for this hypothesis using both a speeded dichotomous categorization task (Studies 1 and 2) and a rating-scale task (Study 2). Implicit prejudice (but not explicit prejudice) was related to increased sensitivity to the targets' facial expressions, regardless of whether prejudice was measured after (Study 1) or before (Study 2) the race categorizations were made.

Although all people belong to a multitude of different social categories and occupy various social roles, the mechanism(s) through which people manage such a complex and potentially incoherent self-concept is not well understood. We report a study showing that excitatory and inhibitory processes act in tandem to keep potentially conflicting self-categorizations from simultaneously occurring. Specifically, when members of the fraternity/sorority system activated their “Greek” identities, the mental representation of their normatively conflicting identity as university students was inhibited below baseline. Importantly, participants who were non-members of the Greek system, although equally familiar with the relevant stereotypes, did not show this pattern of inhibition, indicating that it is only when one experiences conflict between two relevant social categories that such inhibitory processes are engaged.

In seeking to understand how the goal of providing efficient and effective mental health services can best be attained, services researchers have developed principles and methods that distinguish it from other research approaches. In 2000, the National Institute of Mental Health called for translational research paradigms that seek to expand the conceptual and methodological base of mental health services with knowledge gained from basic behavioral sciences such as cognitive, developmental, and social psychology. The goal of this paper is to enter the discussion of what is translational research by illustrating a services research program of the Chicago Consortium for Stigma Research on mental illness stigma. Our research strives to explain the prejudice and discrimination that some landlords and employers show toward people with mental illness in terms of basic research from social psychology and contextual sociology. We end the paper with a discussion of the implications of this research approach for the very practical issues of trying to change mental illness stigma.

We propose that social attitudes, and in particular implicit prejudice, bias people's perceptions of the facial emotion displayed by others. To test this hypothesis, we employed a facial emotion change-detection task in which European American participants detected the offset (Study 1) or onset (Study 2) of facial anger in both Black and White targets. Higher implicit (but not explicit) prejudice was associated with a greater readiness to perceive anger in Black faces, but neither explicit nor implicit prejudice predicted anger perceptions regarding similar White faces. This pattern indicates that European Americans high in implicit racial prejudice are biased to perceive threatening affect in Black but not White faces, suggesting that the deleterious effects of stereotypes may take hold extremely early in social interaction.

The present research investigated the generation of memory illusions. In particular, it attempted to delineate the conditions under which category-based thinking prompts the elicitation of false memories. Noting fundamental differences in the manner in which expected and unexpected person-related information is processed and represented in the mind, it was anticipated that, via gist-based recognition, participants would display a pronounced propensity to generate expectancy-consistent false memories. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. In addition, the research revealed that participants' false memories were accompanied by the subjective experience of knowing (Expt. 2) and that false recognition was exacerbated under conditions of executive dysfunction (Expt. 3). We consider the theoretical implications of these findings for recent treatments of memory illusions and social cognition.

When judging another person, people often spontaneously compare this person with themselves. Six studies examined the self-evaluative consequences of such spontaneous comparisons with in-group versus out-group members. They demonstrate that spontaneous comparisons with in-group members primarily involved the activation of specific individuating knowledge about the self. In particular, knowledge indicating that the self is similar to the judged target was rendered accessible. As a consequence, subsequent self-evaluations that were based on the implications of accessible self-knowledge were assimilated toward in-group targets. Spontaneous comparisons with out-group members, however, primarily involved the activation of more general category knowledge about the self. Specifically, knowledge about judges' membership in a group that distinguished them from the target was rendered accessible. Consequently, self-evaluations were contrasted away from out-group targets.

Affective states can influence evaluative judgments by serving as a source of information in the judgment process. Stigmatized minority groups often elicit negative affective reactions and thus may suffer from the infusion of negative feelings into evaluative judgments made about them. However, a commitment to egalitarian ideals may lead social perceivers to seek to avoid being influenced by their negative affect towards minorities. It was predicted and found that negative feelings about a stigmatized social group (gay men and lesbians) would not be evident in explicit evaluations unless situational cues are present that provide a seemingly legitimate basis for negative evaluation other than the group stigma per se. Thus, even if perceivers consider their negative feelings about minority groups to be `inadmissible information,' when these feelings can be misattributed to some seemingly relevant feature other than the target group's identity, they can indeed result in substantially more negative evaluative reactions.

We report two studies investigating the impact of how a stereotype-inconsistent exemplar is categorized. In both studies, participants were presented with a description about a specific target and worked on different categorization tasks. Categorization tasks eliciting an inclusion of the target into the group category resulted in less stereotypic judgments about the group and in more stereotypic judgments about the target compared to categorization tasks eliciting exclusion of the target from the category. The results suggest that under exclusion conditions, a stereotype-inconsistent exemplar can increase stereotypic judgments about the group (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 shows that these categorization effects are attenuated if participants' processing motivation is increased at the encoding stage. The importance of a range of psychological variables that can influence the categorization, and thus the impact, of atypical exemplars is discussed.

In attempting to make sense of others, perceivers regularly construct and use categorical representations (e.g. stereotypes) to streamline the person perception process. A debate that has dominated recent theorizing about the nature and function of these representations concerns the conditions under which they are activated in everyday life. The present article reviews this work and considers the automaticity of category activation in person perception.

Examines the correlation between anchoring bias and sadness of a person. Susceptibility of sad people to biases than with the neutral-mood counterparts; Dependence of anchoring bias with the composites being set; Interaction of item valence with anchor value.

Results of three studies suggest that the multifaceted nature of identity provides a strategic basis for reducing the threat involved in upward social comparisons. After performing worse than a comparison standard, people may strategically emphasize aspects of their identity that differentiate them from the standard, thereby making the standard less relevant for self-evaluation. On the basis of previous research showing that persons low in self-esteem are less likely to make effective use of self-protection strategies, we hypothesized that this strategy of deflecting the threat involved in upward comparison (i.e., decreasing perceived comparability by emphasizing an unshared social identity) would be used primarily by persons who are characteristically high in self-esteem. This pattern was confirmed in three studies. Moreover, use of the strategy was associated with relatively more positive affect following threatening upward comparisons.

Focuses on cognitive dynamics of categorical social perception. Relevance of categorical thinking in daily life; Process of activating social categories by perceivers; Consequences of category activation; Control of perceivers on the influence and expression of categorical thinking; Use of integrative models of cognitive functioning in understanding categorical social perception.

Asian-American women's performance on a test of quantitative skill was studied as a function of whether their Asian, female, or individual identity was salient at the time of testing. In previous research, ethnicity salience was found to result in enhanced math performance among Asian women. However, the investigators relied on a subtle manipulation of ethnicity salience that likely did not invoke concerns about group reputation nor make salient the common cultural stereotypes concerning Asians' mathematical prowess. We induced a focus on ethnic identity in a manner that was likely to make other people's high performance expectations more salient. Under these conditions, ethnicity salience resulted in diminished ability to concentrate, which in turn led to significantly impaired math performance. Thus, although people commonly hold positive stereotypes about Asians' mathematical skills, making these stereotypes salient prior to performance can create the potential for 'choking' under the pressure of high expectations.

Analyzes the impact of perceptual similarity, cognitive distraction and retrieval context in the process and consequences of cryptomnesia. Cryptomnesia as a form of inadvertent plagiarism; Consequences of memory failure; Implication of impairments in memory source monitoring; Prevention of the occurrence of cryptomnesia.

A pervasive problem in mental life is that of exemplar selectivity or how one isolates specific category members from other instances of a class. This problem is particularly pronounced in person perception, where perceivers may routinely want to personalize selected individuals while continuing to respond towards other members of the category in a stereotype-based manner. To realize these flexible effects, we hypothesized that, when perceivers encounter a group member, they inevitably encode an exemplar-based representation of the individual in mind. Part of this representation, moreover, is information signaling the person's goodness-of-fit with respect to his or her salient group memberships. When the representation is activated on a subsequent occasion, these inferences of category fit moderate the extent of stereotypical thinking. The results of two studies provided converging evidence for this analysis of stereotype function. Exemplar typicality moderated both the accessibility of stereotypic knowledge (Study 1) anxd the extent to which perceivers used a stereotype to organize information about a target (Study 2). We consider the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for our understanding of the role of stereotypes in person perception.

We hypothesized that, by default, perceivers work to defend their social beliefs when counter stereotypic information is encountered. This process was expected to be circumvented when perceivers (a) adopt an accuracy orientation, or (b) lack the cognitive resources required for protecting their stereotypic beliefs. We examined this issue by manipulating perceivers' motivation and attentional capacity. Participants formed impressions of several targets displaying stereotype-consistent, -inconsistent, or -irrelevant behavior. Stereotypicality of participants' subsequent group perceptions was assessed via trait ratings. As predicted, following exposure to counter stereotypic information, participants maintained relatively greater levels of stereotyping when accuracy motivation was low and processing resources were high. We conclude that, although perceivers are typically motivated to defend their stereotypes, this process is effortful and can be disrupted by the imposition of a cognitive load or superseded by the induction of accuracy motivation.

Extending existing work on the conditional automaticity of category activation, the present research investigated the extent to which category activation is moderated by the resolution of visual attention. As visual attention gates access to material in semantic memory, so too should it regulate the activation of social categories when triggering verbal labels are encountered. Accordingly, only when triggering stimuli fall within the spotlight of attention did we expect category activation to occur. The results of two studies supported this prediction. We consider the implications of our findings for recent treatments of category automaticity.

The present research investigated the role of executive functioning in person perception. Given the assumption that perceivers' recollective preference for unexpected material relies on the operation of an executive cognitive process (i.e., inconsistency resolution), it was anticipated that only under dual-task conditions in which executive functioning is impaired would one expect inconsistency resolution to be impaired and perceivers' memory bias for unexpected material to be eliminated. When concurrent mental activity impairs the operation of nonexecutive cognitive operations, inconsistency resolution and the related process of individuation were not expected to be impaired. The results of 2 experiments using different memory measures (e.g., free recall and source identification) supported these predictions. The findings are considered in the context of contemporary issues in person perception and executive functioning.

In four experiments, we investigated the automaticity of exemplar activation. In the first three studies, using a modified flanker task, we investigated the involuntary activation of exemplar-based representations in the presence of triggering verbal stimuli. Results of all three studies demonstrated the unintentional activation of exemplars in memory. In addition, we also identified the temporal parameters (i.e., Study 2) and cerebral localization (i.e., Study 3) of exemplar-based interference effects. In Study 4, we considered the behavioral consequences of exemplar activation. As predicted, the results demonstrated a direct effect of exemplar activation on participants' behavior. We discuss our findings in the context of contemporary issues in person perception and behavioral priming.

Drawing from models of mental control and cognitive self-regulation, it was hypothesized that heightened self-focus would promote the spontaneous suppression of social stereotypes. Participants who were induced to experience heightened self-focus indeed produced less stereotypic descriptions of social targets (Studies 1–4). Study 5 further demonstrated that self-focus produced reductions in stereotyping only among those participants whose personal standards dictated stereotype avoidance. A final study demonstrated that these spontaneous forms of stereotype suppression can produce a rebound effect, in which the magnitude of stereotyping increases markedly after a period of suppression. These findings are considered in the context of contemporary issues in mental control and social stereotyping.

We posited that media images of men influence the gender role attitudes that men express soon after exposure to the images. A total of 212 men (87% European American, 7% Asian or Asian American, 3% African American, and 3% other) viewed magazine advertisements containing images of men that varied in terms of how traditionally masculine vs. androgynous they were and whether the models were the same age or much older than the viewers. Men who had initially been less traditional espoused more traditional attitudes than any other group after exposure to traditionally masculine models, although they continued to endorse relatively nontraditional views after exposure to androgynous models. These findings suggest that nontraditional men''s gender role attitudes may be rather unstable and susceptible to momentary influences such as those found in advertising.

Two studies investigated the effects of processing goals (semantic vs presemantic) on stereotype activation. We posited that spontaneous stereotype activation would only occur when participants process targets (i.e., people) in a semantic manner. In line with this prediction, participants who first processed a target face in a semantic fashion were subsequently faster to verify words that were stereotypic of the target person's gender group compared to participants who had processed the face in presemantic ways. Face recognition, however, did not differ across processing goals. In a second experiment, we replicated these findings using a much shorter stimulus presentation time, verifying that conscious or intentional processes did not underlie the differential stereotype activation. We consider our findings in the context of contemporary issues in stereotyping and automaticity.

Drawing insight from related research on thought control, 2 studies investigated the process through which social perceivers inhibit the retrieval of stereotypic information from long-term memory (i.e., intentional forgetting). Study 1 considered the attentional demands associated with the task of forgetting stereotype-congruent memories; Study 2 examined the efficacy of intentional forgetting under conditions of resource depletion. Confirming the theoretical predictions, the task of inhibiting stereotype-congruent memories made notable demands on participants' attentional resources. The findings are considered in the context of contemporary issues in mental control and stereotype function.

Within the framework of dual-process models of persuasion, it was hypothesized that including references to kin in a persuasive speech might either (a) promote greater scrutiny of the message by making it seem more value-relevant, or (b) serve as a simple peripheral cue of value congruence. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents read a political speech that varied by argument quality (strong/weak), kin terms (absent/present), and the speaker's party affiliation. Results indicated that Democrats scrutinized the message more when kin terms were used, whereas such terms appeared to discourage message elaboration on the part of Republican participants, but only when used by an in-group member. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the efficacy of political rhetoric using kin terms.

In two studies, we investigated the process and consequences of stereotype suppression. In Study 1, participants formed impressions of a target, via an audio-taped self-description, while simultaneously responding to a randomly presented probe stimulus (i.e., probe reaction task). While performing the impression-formation task, some participants were instructed to inhibit their stereotypes about the target's social group; others were given no such instruction. The results demonstrated: (i) that stereotype suppression is an effortful, resource-demanding mental process; and (ii) that stereotype suppression ironically reduces attentional resources available for processing target-related information. Study 2 replicated the finding that stereotype suppressors had impaired memory for nonstereotypic individuating information and revealed another ironic consequence of mental control. Specifically, following a period of stereotype suppression, participants demonstrated enhanced recall for the formerly unwanted stereotypic material.

Although African-Americans as a group are economically disadvantaged compared to the white majority group, there are numerous salient counterexamples of black influence. How do media images of highly successful African-Americans affect Whites′ beliefs about the economic or political status of African-Americans as a whole? Three experiments are reported that begin to address this question by surreptitiously activating thoughts about specific exemplars of African-American success and observing the consequences for a measure of perceived discrimination against Blacks. Contrary to the Enlightened Racism perspective, which claims that images of affluent African-Americans are taken by white audiences as evidence of a lack of discriminatory barriers to black success, Experiment 1 revealed that prior activation of a successful, well-liked black exemplar resulted in increased perceptions of discrimination in contemporary society. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and showed further that it is limited to successful exemplars who are well liked; successful exemplars about whom subjects had more neutral attitudes did not produce any changes in perceptions of discrimination. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the effect of successful, well-liked exemplars vanishes when people first think about the fact that the exemplars are atypical members of the group. These findings are discussed in terms of a generalized appraisal process in which momentarily salient outgroup exemplars influence intergroup attitudes, which in turn affect judgments and beliefs about the group via an attitude heuristic.

Although people simultaneously belong to multiple social categories, any one of these competing representations can dominate the categorization process. It is surprising therefore to learn that only a few studies have considered the question of how people are categorized when multiple categorizations are available. In addition, relatively little is known about the cognitive mechanisms through which these categorization effects are realized. In the reported research, we attempted to extend recent ideas from work on selective attention to shed some light on these fundamental issues in social perception. Our basic contention was that following the initial identification of a person's applicable categories, the categorization process is driven by the interplay of both excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms. The results of 3 studies supported this contention. We discuss our findings in the wider context of contemporary issues in social stereotyping.

Four experiments examined the effects of happiness on the tendency to use stereotypes in social judgment. In each experiment, individuals who had been induced to feel happy rendered more stereotypic judgments than did those in a neutral mood. Experiment 1 demonstrated this phenomenon with a mood induction procedure that involved recalling life experiences. Experiments 2 and 3 suggested that the greater reliance on stereotypes evident in the judgments of happy individuals was not attributable to cognitive capacity deficits created by intrusive happy thoughts or by cognitively disruptive excitement or energetic arousal that may accompany the experience of happiness. In Experiment 4, happy individuals again were found to render more stereotypic judgments, except under conditions in which they had been told that they would be held accountable for their judgments. These results suggest that although happy people's tendency to engage in stereotypic thinking may be pervasive, they are quite capable of avoiding the influence of stereotypes in their judgments when situational factors provide a motivational impetus for such effort.

The overwhelming majority of research on affect and social information processing has focused on the judgment and memories of people in good or bad mood 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 she 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 I 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 strategies.

For a variety of reasons, social perceivers may often attempt to actively inhibit stereotypic thoughts before their effects impinge on judgment and behavior. However, research on the psychology of mental control raises doubts about the efficacy of this strategy. Indeed, this work suggests that when people attempt to suppress unwanted thoughts, these thoughts are likely to subsequently reappear with even greater insistence than if they had never been suppressed (i.e., a "rebound" effect). The present research comprised an investigation of the extent to which this kind of rebound effect extends to unwanted stereotypic thoughts about others. The results provided strong support for the existence of this effect. Relative to control subjects (i.e., stereotype users), stereotype suppressors responded more pejoratively to a stereotyped target on a range of dependent measures. We discuss our findings in the wider context of models of mind, thought suppression, and social stereotyping.

By use of a dual-task paradigm, 3 studies investigated the contention that stereotypes function as resource-preserving devices in mental life. In Study 1, Ss formed impressions of targets while simultaneously monitoring a prose passage. The results demonstrated a significant enhancement in Ss' prose-monitoring performance when stereotype labels were present on the impression-formation task. To investigate the intentionality of this effect, in Study 2, the procedures used in Study 1 were repeated using a subliminal priming procedure to activate stereotypes. Subliminal activation of stereotypes produced the same resource-preserving effects as supraliminal activation did. This effect, moreover, was replicated in Study 3 when a probe reaction task was used to measure resource preservation. These findings, which generalized across a range of social stereotypes, are discussed in terms of their implications for contemporary models of stereotyping and social inference.

This research examined the effects of stereotypic beliefs and hindsight biases on perceptions of court cases. Subjects read evidentiary material pertaining to a criminal trial in which the defendant either was a stereotyped offender or was not. Additionally, some subjects were given outcome information about the verdict attained in the trial; half of these subjects were told that the defendant had been found guilty, and the other half were told that he had been found not guilty. The remainder were not given any outcome information. Subjects were than asked to predict the likely outcome of a trial based on the presented evidence. Typical hindsight bias effects were expected and obtained for nonstereotyped offenders; subjects considering these cases viewed the evidence as less incriminating when they were told the defendant had been found not guilty, and they found it to be more incriminating when they were told the defendant had been found guilty, when compared to the no-outcome-information group. However, no hindsight biases were evident in judgments of cases involving stereotyped defendants, who were seen as relatively more likely to be guilty regardless of the nature of outcome information presented. Particularly striking was the lack of impact of the "not guilty" outcome information on perceptions of the guilt of stereotyped defendants. These findings suggest that strong expectations held in foresight may not be amenable to modification in hindsight.

Focuses on the role of stereotypes in judgmental heuristics. Accounts on the process of activating stereotypes; Importance regular variations of arousal level in determining the types of information processing strategies; Importance of circadian variations in arousal levels.

Four hundred stimulus behaviors and their mean normative ratings for kindness, intelligence, goodness, and normality were presented for use in person perception and memory studies. Each of the four normative ratings was based on a separate sample of 35 to 39 undergraduate students from the University of Illinois. Rankings of the mean ratings were provided to facilitate a quick comparison of the behavior ratings along each of the four trait dimensions. In addition, a cluster analysis of the behaviors was reported, using the mean kindness, intelligence, and normality ratings as defining variables. Six clusters were distinguished: (1) behaviors that primarily conveyed indness; (2) behaviors that primarily conveyed unkindness; (3) behaviors that conveyed an unusual amount of intelligence; (4) behaviors that conveyed general intelligence; (5) behaviors that conveyed a general lack of intelligence; and (6) behaviors that conveyed very little information about kindness or intelligence.

Two information-processing mechanisms that could potentially contribute to judgmental discrimination against the members of stereotyped social groups were examined in two experiments, using a mock juror decision-making task. Both postulated mechanisms involve biased processing of judgment-relevant evidence. The interpretation hypothesis asserts that the activation of stereotypic concepts influences the perceived probative implications of other evidence. The selective processing hypothesis asserts that stereotype-consistent evidence is processed more extensively than is inconsistent evidence. Judgment and memory data from the first experiment supported the general notion that stereotype-based discrimination emerges from biased evidence processing. The specific pattern of results supported selective processing rather than interpretation biases as the critical process underlying observed judgmental discrimination. The second experiment corroborated this conclusion by showing that a manipulation that prevents selective processing of the evidence effectively eliminated biases in judgments and recall pertaining to stereotyped targets. Implications for a general understanding of stereotyping and discrimination are discussed.

Subjects read information about a defendant in a criminal trial with initial instructions to judge either his guilt (guilt judgment objective) or his aggressiveness (trait judgment objective). The defendant was either Hispanic or ethnically nondescript. After considering the evidence, subjects made both guilt and aggressiveness judgments (regardless of which type of judgment they were instructed to make at the time they read the information) and then recalled as much of the information they read as they could. Results favored the hypothesis that when subjects face a complex judgmental situation, they use stereotypes (when available and relevant) as a way of simplifying the judgment. Specifically, they use the stereotype as a central theme around which they organize presented evidence that is consistent with it, and they neglect inconsistent information. Subjects with a (complex) guilt judgment objective judged the defendant to be relatively more guilty and aggressive and recalled more negative information about him if he was Hispanic than if he was ethnically nondescript. In contrast, subjects with a (simple) trait judgment objective did not perceive either the guilt or aggressiveness of the two defendants to be appreciably different, and did not display any significant bias in their recall of the evidence. These and other results are discussed in terms of the information-processing strategies subjects are likely to use when they expect to make different types of judgments.

In two experiments we investigated the effects of stereotyping on (a) reactions to a behavioral transgression and (b) the recall of information bearing on it. Subjects read a case file describing a transgression committed by a target (in Experiment 1, a job-related infraction; in Experiment 2, a criminal act). In some cases, the target's transgression was stereotypic of the target's ethnic group (conveyed through his name), and in other cases it was not. After reading the case file, subjects judged the likelihood that the transgression would recur and recommended punishment for the offense. These judgment data supported the hypothesis that stereotypes function as judgmental heuristics. Specifically, subjects used a stereotype of the target to infer the reasons for his transgression, and then based their punishment decisions on the implications of these inferences, considering other relevant information only when a stereotype-based explanation of the behavior was not available. However, recall data suggested that once a stereotype-based impression of the crime and its determinants was formed, subjects reviewed other available information in an attempt to confirm the implications of this impression. This led to differential recall of presented information, depending on whether its implications were consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to those of the stereotype.

In two experiments we investigated the effects of stereotyping on (a) reactions to a behavioral transgression and (b) the recall of information bearing on it. Subjects read a case file describing a transgression committed by a target (in Experiment 1, a job-related infraction; in Experiment 2, a criminal act). In some cases, the target's transgression was stereotypic of the target's ethnic group (conveyed through his name), and in other cases it was not. After reading the case file, subjects judged the likelihood that the transgression would recur and recommended punishment for the offense. These judgment data supported the hypothesis that stereotypes function as judgmental heuristics. Specifically, subjects used a stereotype of the target to infer the reasons for his transgression, and then based their punishment decisions on the implications of these inferences, considering other relevant information only when a stereotype-based explanation of the behavior was not available. However, recall data suggested that once a stereotype-based impression of the crime and its determinants was formed, subjects reviewed other available information in an attempt to confirm the implications of this impression. This led to differential recall of presented information, depending on whether its implications were consistent with, inconsistent with, or irrelevant to those of the stereotype.

Emotional communication patterns characterizing interactions between partners in close relationships were investigated by asking 29 couples who were married or living together to engage in a videotaped discussion of a problem they were having in their relationship. In a later experimental session, partners identified specific communications that they believed had an important influence on the discussion and then rated the communications in terms of the feelings the communicator intended to convey and the recipient's reactions. Partners attempted to reciprocate both the positive and negative feelings that they perceived their partner to express toward them. However, only negative feelings were actually reciprocated. This was because subjects were sensitive to differences in the negative feelings their partners reported expressing and interpreted those feelings correctly, but they were inaccurate in perceiving their partners' expressions of positive feelings. Men (but not women) interpreted their partners' failures to express love as an indication of hostility, whereas women (but not men) interpreted their partners' lack of hostility as an indication of love. These and other results were conceptualized in terms of a general model of emotional communication. Parameters of the model pertaining to the hostility of partners' communications were often related to women's satisfaction with their relationship and their beliefs about relationships in general. However, they were unrelated to men's satisfaction and general beliefs. This suggested that women are generally more adversely affected by overt expressions of hostility than are men.

We used comparative judgment procedures in two experiments to investigate the cognitive processes that mediate people's reconstruction of the social events they read about. Subjects in Experiment 1 read a passage describing a series of behaviors manifested by a person in three situations. Subsequently, they were given pairs of these actions and were asked to judge either which action occurred sooner or which occurred later. These judgments were (a) faster when the behaviors being compared occurred near the middle of the situation to which they pertained than when they occurred near either the beginning or the end, (b) faster when the three situations were unrelated to one another than when they were thematically related, and (c) faster when the behaviors being compared occurred in different situations than when they occurred in the same situation. Actions were compared more quickly if they were far apart in the overall series presented than if they were close together, replicating the symbolic temporal distance effects obtained when scripted actions are judged on the basis of general knowledge. However, a semantic congruity effect (a tendency for actions near the beginning of the series to be discriminated more quickly when subjects are asked which comes sooner, but for actions near the end to be discriminated more quickly when subjects are asked which comes later) was not evident. In Experiment 2, subjects read a passage about a person's visit to a restaurant in which both generic actions (e.g., ordering the meal) and particularized actions (e.g., salting the fries) were described. Symbolic distance had a greater effect on judgments of particularized actions than on judgments of generic actions. Congruity effects were found only for judgments of generic actions. To account for these effects, a model of temporal order judgments is proposed that considers both the manner in which situation-specific actions are encoded into memory at the time they are learned and the process of comparing the actions at the time they are judged.

The memorial representations of events that result from different types of goal-directed cognition are conceptualized on the basis of the general model of information processing proposed by Wyer and Srull (1980, 1984). In a test of this conceptualization, subjects read a passage describing the events that took place at a cocktail party. They were told either (a) to form an impression of the party and the events that occurred, (b) to empathize with the person from whose perspective the passage was written, or (c) to remember the information presented in a way that would allow them to reproduce it. The stimulus passage contained two target events, each consisting of actions that were either described chronologically or in reverse order, and were either presented together or were separated by other unrelated material. After either a short or a long delay, subjects recalled the information they read in the order it came to mind. Finally, subjects were given the individual event actions and told to place them in the order they were presented. The actions comprising target events were generally more likely to be recalled together and in chronological order when subjects had learned about them with either an impression formation or an empathy objective than when they had read about them with the goal of remembering them. However, orderings of these actions were affected by task objectives only after a long delay. The effect of task objectives on the order of recalling the events themselves showed a quite different pattern; for example, subjects with an empathy objective were most likely to recall the last target event presented before the first one after a long delay, whereas subjects with an impression objective were least likely to do so. The proposed model provided a reasonable account of these and other effects of task objectives on memory for events and the actions comprising them.

A conceptualization of the manner in which trait and behavioral information is organized in memory is proposed and applied in predicting both the recall and recognition of information about persons and groups. Three information presentation conditions were considered: (1) Subjects are told to form an impression of a target (person or group) on the basis of the target's behaviors, and are given a trait-based concept of what the target is like before learning about these behaviors. (2) Subjects are told to form an impression of the target, but a general traitbased concept of the target is not induced until after they learn about the target's behaviors. (3) Subjects receive information about the target's behaviors with instructions to remember the information, and only subsequently are told to form an impression and are given more general information about the target's traits. The proposed model accounted for between-condition differences in both the recall and recognition of behaviors that were consistent and inconsistent with a general trait-based concept of the target, and for contingencies of these differences on whether the target was a single person or a group.

We present a model of reappropriation, the phenomenon whereby a stigmatized group revalues an externally imposed negative label by self-consciously referring to itself in terms of that label. The model specifies the causes and consequences of reappropriation as well as the essential conditions necessary for reappropriation to be effective. To place the concept of reappropriation in proper context, we begin by discussing the roots of stigma and the mediating role played by social categorization and social identity in the realization of stigma’s deleterious effects. We also discuss the strategies available to both individuals and groups by which stigmatized individuals can enhance their devalued social identities. We provide a discussion of two historical cases of reappropriation and some preliminary empirical evidence concerning the consequences of self-labeling and attempting to reappropriate a stigmatizing label. Finally we discuss the implications of the model for groups and teams, both within and outside of organizations.

If there is anything that resembles a "holy trinity" within psychology, it is perhaps that most psychological phenomena possess a cognitive, affective, and behavioral component (McGuire, 1985). The same is true when adopting a social psychological approach to understanding mental illness stigma. Social psychologists make a distinction between stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination (Fiske, 1998). A stereotype of people with mental illness can be defined as a cognitive representation of this group that is stored in memory. This cognitive representation, which is often a socially shared one, depicts individuals with mental illness as possessing certain traits (e.g., "bizarre") or engaging in certain behaviors (e.g., talking to oneself). In contrast, prejudice against persons with mental illness refers to a negative affective reaction, evaluation, or attitude toward this group of people. Completing the trinity, discrimination refers to negative behaviors or actions directed toward people with mental illness (e.g., refusing to hire a person with mental illness). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are often causally related. For example, an individual who believes that persons with mental illness are incompetent (stereotype) might consequently evaluate an individual with mental illness in a negative fashion (prejudice), and therefore refuse to hire that person (discrimination). Effects of this nature have important implications for mental health workers (e.g., psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers). Namely, efforts to alleviate problems associated with mental illness should include social interventions that are designed to reduce unwarranted discrimination against these individuals.