was unrelated to fear of Black Americans. Conversely, when participants were encouraged to conceptualize their negative affect as fear, negative affect predicted fear of Black Americans. To account for the possibility that our self-report findings may have been due to demand characteristics, we computed scores for internal and external motivation to conceal prejudice by taking the average of the relevant items and then examined whether our manipulation changed participants’ motivations to conceal prejudice. External motivation to conceal prejudice, in particular, examines normative motivations for participants to respond without prejudice and thus can be considered an index of social desirability. Internal motivation to conceal prejudice did not significantly differ between participants in the fear condition (M = 6.93, SD = 1.87) and participants in the sympathy condition (M = 7.11, SD = 1.46), t (153.78) = .70, p = .48. Further, external motivation to conceal prejudice also did not significantly differ between participants in the fear condition (M = 4.62, SD = 2.16) and participants in the sympathy condition (M = 4.36, SD = 2.20), t (170) = .78, p = .44. These results demonstrate that emotion condition did not change participants’ motivations to conceal prejudice. To further rule out the possibility of demand characteristics, we next reran the regression analysis predicting explicit fear from negative affect, emotion condition, and their interaction while also including internal and external motivation to conceal prejudice as covariates. Including external motivation to conceal prejudice in the regression equation allowed us to account for the possibility that demand characteristics influenced participants’ self-reported fear for Black Americans. We standardized all variables using z-scores prior to analyses. Even after controlling for internal and external motivations to conceal prejudice, we still find the predicted interaction between negative affect and emotion condition, b = .16, t (166) = 2.24, p = .03. We also find the predicted simple effects where participants high in negative affect tend to endorse
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