Are you feeling high levels of social judgement?

Overview

Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.

In our daily lives we frequently make judgements about other individuals that influence our willingness to socially engage with them. We often rely on information from an individual's facial appearance to guide these judgements. Given this, there has been considerable interest in elucidating the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie the ability to make social judgements from an individual's facial appearance. The social judgements of trustworthiness and approachability have been of particular interest to researchers Individual faces vary in both their perceived approachability and trustworthiness. An impaired capacity to make these social judgements has been observed in individuals within a number of clinical populations, including those with bilateral amygdala lesions, autism and Williams syndrome implicating the amygdala in this ability. The involvement of the amygdala in the process of making social judgements is thought to stem from its role in threat detection, the assessment of which is thought to be central to the capacity to make appropriate social judgements