The question of how emotion and intellect interact is of longstanding interest, and we have been particularly interested in the question of how emotional states and feelings of arousal relate to processes of social perception. Our work indicates that some feeling states seem to be associated with a greater propensity to judge others superficially, on the basis of their group membership or apparent credibility. Transitory sadness, however, shows no such pattern. Other work on emotion and social perception has examined the ways that we perceive and respond to the emotional states of our relationship partners. We have pursued a number of investigations designed to show that exemplars play a crucial role in social cognition, and that our judgments of the social world depend in part on the particular exemplars that happen to be salient in the judgmental context.
Exemplar activation occurs automatically in the presence of strong retrieval cues.
In addition to specific exemplars, the general schemas that are activated in a particular judgment context are likely to have a pronounced influence on social cognition. Social Memory To function effectively in the social world, we need to have an extensive knowledge base about what particular people, groups, and events are like. Our examinations of social memory processes have attempted to shed light on these kinds of issues. Self-evaluative consequences of judging ingroup and outgroup members . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .