Abstract
A series of studies explored how sadness impacts the accuracy of social judgments. In Study 1, induced sadness led to reduced accuracy in judgments of teacher effectiveness from brief samples of nonverbal behavior (thin slices). In Study 2, sad participants showed reduced accuracy in judging relationship type from thin slices as well as diminished judgmental efficiency. Study 3 revealed that higher Beck Depression Inventory scores were associated with diminished accuracy on the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity. Finally, Study 4 tested the possibility that sadness impairs accuracy by promoting a more deliberative information-processing style. As expected, accuracy was higher among participants in a sad mood condition who completed the judgment task while simultaneously performing a distracting cognitive load task.
Keywords
SadnessPsychologyMoodNonverbal communicationTask (project management)Cognitive psychologySocial psychologyDevelopmental psychologyAnger
MeSH Terms
AffectAnalysis of VarianceDepressionFemaleHumansJudgmentMalePsychological TheorySocial Perception
Affiliated Institutions
Related Publications
The psychology of being "right": The problem of accuracy in social perception and cognition.
Several difficulties are noted with general questions psychologists have been asking about human accuracy, such as whether people are typically accurate or inaccurate, what the ...
Getting at the truth or getting along: Accuracy- versus impression-motivated heuristic and systematic processing.
Two studies examined the heuristic and systematic processing of accuracy- versus impression-motivated individuals expecting a discussion with a partner believed to hold either a...
The Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS): A dynamic, multimodal set of facial and vocal expressions in North American English
The RAVDESS is a validated multimodal database of emotional speech and song. The database is gender balanced consisting of 24 professional actors, vocalizing lexically-matched s...
Knowing that you don't know: Metamemory and discourse processing.
In 6 experiments, the authors used a speeded question-answering task and a recognition task to examine how people know what they don't know. Extending work by S. Glucksberg and ...
Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements
It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. Th...
Publication Info
- Year
- 2002
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 83
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 947-961
- Citations
- 262
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
262
OpenAlex
16
Influential
191
CrossRef
Cite This
Nalini Ambady,
Heather M. Gray
(2002).
On being sad and mistaken: Mood effects on the accuracy of thin-slice judgments..
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 83
(4)
, 947-961.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.4.947
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1037/0022-3514.83.4.947
- PMID
- 12374446