Impact of the emotional states of anger versus sadness in social categorization of partners in a trust game task.

The main goal of this project is to examine whether the emotional states of anger and sadness differentially impact the use of individuation and social categorization strategies when making inferences about unknown individuals using the Trust Game. After interacting with different black and white individuals in a multi-round Trust Game (those from one ethnic group being cooperative in 75% of the times, and those from the other ethnic group only in 25% of the times), this design displayed opposite patterns of cooperation between the two ethnic groups. Then, participants interacted with new individual from both ethnic groups in an induced emotional state of either anger, sadness or neutral, all individuals were cooperative 50% of the time. We expected anger to facilitate categorical processing of new individuals (i.e., participants cooperating or not with them according to whether their group was cooperative or not as a whole in the learning phase), whereas sadness was expected to facilitate individuation (i.e., participants cooperating or not with the new individuals independently of the cooperation rate of their groups in the learning phase). Our data did not confirm these hypotheses suggesting that negative emotions may not impact our behaviors in an interpersonal context.