BEYOND SIMPLE PESSIMISM - EFFECTS OF SADNESS AND ANGER ON SOCIAL-PERCEPTION

In keeping with cognitive appraisal models of emotion, it was hypothes ized that sadness and anger would exert different influences on causal judgments. Two experiments provided initial support for this hypothes is. Sad Ss perceived situationally caused events as more likely (Exper iment 1) and situational forces more responsible for an ambiguous even t (Experiment 2) than angry Ss, who, in contrast, perceived events cau sed by humans as more likely and other people as more responsible. Exp eriments 3, 4, and 5 showed that the experience of these emotions, rat her than their cognitive constituents, mediates these effects. The non emotional exposure to situational or human agency information did not influence causal judgments (Experiment 3), whereas the induction of sa dness and anger without explicit agency information did (Experiments 4 and 5). Discussion is focused on the influence of emotion on social j udgment.