Seeing Others through Affect-Tinted Glasses: Affect Shapes Social Perception and Judgement of Non-Neutral Targets

Incidental affect appears to play an equally important role in constructing conscious experience of social others even for target individuals signaling explicit affective value (e.g., smiling or scowling), or for individuals about whom a perceiver has overt positive or negative evaluations (e.g., perceivers with self-reported bias toward a social group).