In plain language
Common sense suggests that anxious people in a bad mood would be the harshest judges of outsiders. This study tested that assumption by asking how two things — a person's enduring level of anxiety (trait anxiety) and their temporary mood — combine to shape judgments of members of a racial out-group.
The researchers measured participants' trait anxiety and examined how experiencing aversive (negative) mood affected their intergroup judgments. For people low in trait anxiety, the result was what mood research would predict: negative affect spilled over into their judgments, and they evaluated a threatening out-group more negatively when feeling bad. But people high in trait anxiety showed the opposite, paradoxical pattern — when they felt bad, they appeared to actively rein in their negative tendencies and produced more positive, tolerant judgments.
The authors' explanation is that low-anxiety individuals processed information automatically, letting their mood colour what they thought of others, whereas the combination of high anxiety and aversive mood triggered a more controlled, motivated style of thinking aimed at eliminating socially undesirable intergroup judgments. The study shows that prejudice is not a fixed attitude but depends on the interplay of personality, feelings, and how much people monitor their own judgments — an early demonstration of the affect-regulation processes that later became central to research on emotion and social judgment.
Key findings
- Participants low in trait anxiety showed mood-congruent bias: when experiencing negative affect, they judged a threatening racial out-group more negatively.
- Participants high in trait anxiety showed the opposite, paradoxical pattern: when feeling bad, they produced more positive and tolerant intergroup judgments.
- The evidence suggested high trait-anxious people went out of their way to control their negative tendencies when in an aversive mood.
- The authors interpreted the reversal as a shift in processing style: automatic, affect-infused processing in low-anxiety individuals versus controlled, motivated processing — aimed at avoiding socially undesirable judgments — when high anxiety combined with bad mood.
- The findings show that the effect of mood on prejudice depends on personality, demonstrating that trait anxiety can act as a brake rather than an amplifier of intergroup negativity.
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J. V., & Forgas, J. P. (1999). On being tense yet tolerant: The paradoxical effects of trait anxiety and aversive mood on intergroup judgments. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3(3), 227–238. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2699.3.3.227
BibTeX
@article{ciarrochi1999on,
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph V. and Forgas, Joseph P.},
title = {On being tense yet tolerant: The paradoxical effects of trait anxiety and aversive mood on intergroup judgments},
journal = {Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice},
year = {1999},
volume = {3},
number = {3},
pages = {227--238},
doi = {10.1037/1089-2699.3.3.227}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.