The influence of origin and valence of words on the social judgments of unknown people

When we assess unknown people, we tend to be positively biased: we give them rather good assessments. However, can this positivity bias be limited or moderated? How would emotions of different origins (i.e., type of mechanisms involved in the formation of emotion: automatic vs. reflective) influence social judgments? We predicted that automatic emotions (of fast and effortless origin) would enhance the presence of positivity bias compared to reflective emotions (slow and effortful). Participants were asked to read and react to emotional words (differing in their origin: automatic, mixed, or reflective and in valence: positive and negative), process them in tasks (eliciting automatic or reflective processing), and assess the personality traits of unknown people in pictures. Participants tended to assess negative traits as less intense than positive traits; they assessed all traits as less intense in the automatic manipulation compared to the reflective task. Our results further explore the role of different emotional dimensions in the diffusion of incidental affect and show the role of the origin of emotion and the mode of processing in this phenomenon.