Carryover effects of emotions that lead to biases in social judgments are commonly
observed. We suggest that such effects may be influenced by the ability to engage
or disengage attention from emotional stimuli. We assessed the ability to activate
and inhibit attention to anger stimuli, experimentally induced anger in a demanding
task, and measured social judgment toward an ambiguous target. Results show that
higher activation and higher inhibition of anger-related information predicted more biased
evaluations of the ambiguous target when individuals were experiencing anger, but not
in an emotionally neutral condition. Interestingly, the effect of activation and inhibition in
the anger condition emerged only when such variables were entered simultaneously
in the regression model, indicating that they had an additive effect in predicting
carryover effects of anger on social judgement. Results are consistent with a cooperative
suppression effect (Conger, 1974) of activation and inhibition and may be explained by
either an increased accessibility of anger-related cues leading to more biased social
judgments, or by an instance in which being good at engaging in and disengaging
attention from emotional cues might have depleted participants’ resources making
carryover effects of anger more likely to occur. Ultimately, the finding highlight that
individual differences in attentional processes are important moderators for carryover
effects of emotions.