On mood and peculiar people : affect and person typicality in impression formation

Are memories and impressions about unusual, atypical people more likely to be influenced by mood? Atypical targets were expected to elicit more extensive processing, and mood-primed associations were expected to play a greater role in such judgments. In Experiment 1 (N= 72) mood effects were stronger on judgments of atypical than of prototypical persons. In Experiment 2 (N = 42) mood effects on memory were greater for atypical targets, and recall was also better for typical people in positive mood and for atypical targets in negative mood. Experiment 3(N= 60) replicated these findings and also found greater mood effects on processing and judgmental latencies for atypical than for typical targets. The results suggest that mood effects depend on the kind of processing strategies triggered by prototypical and atypical targets, consistent with recent multiprocess theories of affect and cognition (Forgas, 1992a). The implications of the results for current affect-cognition models, as well as everyday instances of affective biases in social judgments and stereotyping, are considered.

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