ABSTRACT
In his classic definition, Allport (1968) described social psychology as the scientific study of the way in which the real, imagined, or implied presence of others influences the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals. When Allport wrote this definition, however, most of the research addressed thoughts and behaviors rather than feelings. Traditionally, when feelings were studied, they were studied in the form of attitudes, evaluations, or sentiments (e.g., balance theory). That began to change in the early 1970s when researchers began directly manipulating feelings in the laboratory and assessing the effects of these feelings on thoughts and behavior. Gouaux (1971), for example, had participants watch either a happy or a sad film and then evaluate a stimulus person. Griffit and Veitch (1971) had participants evaluate a stimulus person while working either in an unpleasantly hot and crowded room or in a pleasant, uncrowded room. Both of these experiments showed that participants’ affective experiences could influence their attraction toward a stimulus person over and above their evaluative beliefs about the person. Because much of this initial work was couched in conditioning terms (e.g., Clore & Byrne, 1974), however, it did not directly address the effects of feelings on cognition.
