Strange Couples: Mood Effects on Judgments and Memory about Prototypical and Atypical Relationships

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Abstract
Do feelings have a disproportionate impact on the way we perceive and remember unusual, atypical people? Based on the author's recent Affect Infusion Model (AIM), four experiments found that extended processing recruited by atypical targets significantly enhanced both negative and positive mood effects on judgments (Experiment 1) as well as on memory (Experiment 2). Furthermore, the degree of a typicality was directly related to the size of mood effects (Experiment 3), and a path analysis showed that these greater mood effects were consistently mediated by longer processing latencies (Experiment 4). Consistent with the AIM, these counterintuitive results suggest that longer and more elaborate processing elicited by atypical targets facilitates the infusion of mood primed associations into judgments. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of processing strategies in mood effects on judgments, and the implications for everyday social judgments and memory are considered.

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