Aj. Lambert et al., MOOD AND THE CORRECTION OF POSITIVE VERSUS NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES, Journal of personality and social psychology, 72(5), 1997, pp. 1002-1016
The present research examined the effects of sadness on the correction
of social stereotypes. Participants who either were or were not induc
ed to feel sad were asked to form an impression of a single individual
who belonged to a group that had either stereotypically positive or n
egative implications. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that sad people corre
cted for their negative, but not for their positive stereotypes. Exper
iment 3 demonstrated that this asymmetry was not due to stereotype val
ence per se but to whether the stereotype was perceived as an inapprop
riate basis for judgment. A model is presented that suggests that sad
people do not simply ignore category-based information, but rather cor
rect for their stereotypes only when they are perceived as inappropria
te, which tends to be more often the case if the stereotype is negativ
e than if it is positive. The implications of the present results for
4 extant models of mood and information processing are discussed.