People's emotions toward their ingroups and salient outgroups often change over time as a result of changing circumstances or intentional self-regulation. To investigate such dynamics, two studies assessed participants' perceived past, present, and ideal levels of group-based emotions toward ingroups and outgroups, for several different types of groups. Consistent with predictions, participants ideally wanted to feel more positive and less negative emotions toward the ingroup compared to their present levels. However, contrary to predictions, ideal emotions toward competitive outgroups were more positive than negative. Several effects over time suggested the successful regulation of emotion: Ideal levels of positive ingroup emotion predicted group-related behavioral intentions as well as emotions reported at a later time, over and above present levels. This work puts group-based emotions in a subjective temporal context and opens new directions for theory-driven investigation and new possibilities for interventions.

We propose a new model of social influence, which can occur spontaneously and in the absence of typically assumed motives. We assume that perceivers routinely construct representations of other people's experiences and responses (beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors), when observing others' responses or simulating the responses of unobserved others. Like representations made accessible by priming, these representations may then influence the process that generates perceivers' own responses, without intention or awareness, especially when there is a strong social connection to the other. We describe evidence for the basic properties and important moderators of this process, which distinguish it from other mechanisms such as informational, normative, or social identity influence. The model offers new perspectives on the role of others' values in producing cultural differences, the persistence and power of stereotypes, the adaptive reasons for being influenced by others' responses, and the impact of others' views about the self.

Group-based emotions are experienced as a result of group categorization and group identification. We first review the transformative idea that emotion can occur as a group-level phenomenon driven by group-level processes. We then briefly review the impact of this idea on research about intragroup processes and intergroup relations in the decades since 1998. We conclude by raising some questions whose answers would further extend the reach and predictive power of group-based emotions in both intragroup and intergroup contexts.

We tested three hypotheses derived from intergroup emotions theory: that group-based emotions, emotions felt as a member of a group, (1) are influenced by group norms, (2) especially for highly identified group members, and (3) are relatively more positive for highly identified members. Hypothesis 4 tested the prediction that these self-categorization, normative influence, and identification processes hold across memberships in exemplars of intimacy, task, and social category groups, which differ from one another in structural and functional characteristics. Two studies using three different samples found strong consistent support for Hypotheses 1 and 3, and only partial support for Hypothesis 2 (high identification increased the power of group norms on group-based emotions about only negative events). These findings held across multiple exemplars of the three group types, regardless of whether group-based emotions were targeted or untargeted, and regardless of whether emotion norms were empirically derived or based on group members’ perceptions.

Emotions are increasingly being recognised as important aspects of prejudice and intergroup behaviour. Specifically, emotional mediators play a key role in the process by which intergroup contact reduces prejudice towards outgroups. However, which particular emotions are most important for prejudice reduction, as well as the consistency and generality of emotion-prejudice relations across different in-group-out-group relations, remain uncertain. To address these issues, in Study 1 we examined six distinct positive and negative emotions as mediators of the contact-prejudice relations using representative samples of U.S. White, Black, and Asian American respondents (N = 639). Admiration and anger (but not other emotions) were significant mediators of the effects of previous contact on prejudice, consistently across different perceiver and target ethnic groups. Study 2 examined the same relations with student participants and gay men as the out-group. Admiration and disgust mediated the effect of past contact on attitude. The findings confirm that not only negative emotions (anger or disgust, based on the specific types of threat perceived to be posed by an out-group), but also positive, status- and esteem-related emotions (admiration) mediate effects of contact on prejudice, robustly across several different respondent and target groups.