Anxiety and impression formation: Direct information rather than priming explains affect-congruity

Abstract

Both affect-priming and affect-as-information theories predict that when people are anxious they will form affect-congruent impressions of others, but via different mechanisms. Affect-priming asserts that memory mediates the influence of anxiety on judgement, whereas affect-as-information asserts that people attribute anxiety to the target of judgement. As these theories predicted, anxious participants in Study 1 found an impression-formation target to be more threatening than did control participants. However, this effect was not mediated by memory, and was attenuated in Study 2 when anxious participants attributed their affect to a source other than the target. These findings suggest that anxious people form affect-congruent impressions of others because they attribute their anxiety to the impression-formation target rather than because anxiety primes affect-congruent memory.

Acknowledgements

This research constitutes a portion of the first author's doctoral dissertation. Some of the results of these studies were presented at the meeting of the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists in April 2003.

The authors wish to thank Amanda Genetti for assistance with data collection and scoring, Joe Forgas for helpful comments as a PhD examiner and afterwards, and Lucy Johnston, Ursula Hess, Klaus Fiedler, Robert Brown, and anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier drafts of the paper.