 21. Emotion and Personality  453
other’s undeserved suffering; pride involves 
positive appraisals of one’s own value within 
the social group; and shame involves the ap -
praisal that one has failed to live up to col -
lectively shared standards of group identity.
Although a rich literature supports the 
widely accepted proposal that appraisals 
lead to emotional responses, the evidence 
is equally strong that appraisals associated 
with current emotion tend to bleed into our 
perception and interpretation of the events 
that follow (for review, see Lerner et al., 
2015). Through their appraisal tendencies,  
specific emotions bias what we attend to, 
our assessment of different events’ probabil -
ity, our perceptions of right and wrong, our 
explanation of other people’s behavior, and 
even what we remember, in ways that are 
in keeping with the lingering appraisal. For 
example, fear is activated by the perception 
of threat, uncertainty, and powerlessness. 
When these appraisal tendencies are carried 
forward, fear narrows attention, leading to 
selective perception of threats and dangers 
(Mathews & MacLeod, 1994; Mineka, Ra -
faeli, & Yovel, 2003). Fearful individuals 
not only preferentially attend to threat, but 
they also perceive threatening and uncertain 
events (e.g., disease, financial troubles, fam -
ily difficulties, disasters) to be more likely in 
their future (Lerner & Keltner, 2001; Lerner, 
Gonzalez, Small, & Fischoff, 2003). Anxious 
decision-  makers prefer uncertainty-  reducing 
options, whereas sad decision-  makers tend 
to prefer reward-  seeking options (Raghu -
nathan & Pham, 1999). Fearfulness, as evi -
dent in self-  reports of fear, increased startle 
responsivity, and reports of nightmares, is 
closely associated with conservative political 
ideology, which highlights ways to reduce 
uncertainty (Oxley et al., 2008).
Increasingly, research is documenting 
carryover or “incidental” effects of specific 
emotions on social cognition that are closely 
tailored to those emotions’ functions. Nie -
denthal, Winkielman, and their colleagues 
have shown that transient emotions guide 
our attention toward those stimuli most rel -
evant to the current emotion’s function, and 
not others, within the social context (e.g., 
Davis, Winkielman, & Coulson, 2015; Nie -
denthal & Halberstadt, 2000; Niedenthal 
& Setterlund, 1994; Niedenthal, 2008). For 
example, people feeling anger tend to iden -tify angry facial expressions more quickly 
compared to appropriate controls (Nieden -
thal & Halberstadt, 2000), a finding with 
important parallels in the documented ten -
dency for abused children to perceive anger 
in complex emotional expressions in the 
face (e.g., Pollak & Kistler, 2002). Emo -
tions also influence judgment and decision 
making in important ways (Lowenstein & 
Lerner, 2003). For example, anger prompts 
people to expect further unfair actions from 
others; sadness, by contrast, prompts people 
to believe that loss is more likely (DeSteno, 
Petty, Wegener, & Rucker, 2000; Keltner et 
al., 1993).
Emotions influence complex moral judg -
ments in systematic ways as well, a the -
sis at the heart of Jonathan Haidt’s (2001, 
2008) influential theorizing about the foun -
dations and mechanisms of moral judg -
ment. In Table 21.1 we summarize some of 
the most recent thinking on this issue (for 
summary, see Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & 
Cohen, 2009). Unsurprisingly, angry people 
are more inclined to punish those who have 
transgressed social norms and morals (Dar -
ley, Carlsmith, & Robinson, 2000). By con -
trast, highly compassionate people tend to 
overestimate their commonalities with oth -
ers, which in turn accounts for their altruis -
tic tendencies and reduced tendencies toward 
retributive punishment (DeSteno, 2015; Lim 
TABLE 21.1.  Theorized and Documented 
Associations between Specific Emotions 
and Moral Concerns
EmotionMoral concern made salient 
by emotion
Disgust Purity of body and mind
Anger Fairness, autonomy
Compassion Undeserved harm
Gratitude Reciprocity, equality
Contempt Violation of role, duty
Pride Meritocratic allocation of resources
Guilt Own moral transgression
Shame Own character flaw
Awe Principles that define group