Figure - uploaded by Juraj Petrík
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
This study, theoretically based on integrated threat and image theory, explored (1) the mental constructs produced by the Slovak majority in relation to cooperation with the Roma minority and (2) differences in thinking about different Roma demographic groups. In Slovakia, prejudice towards Roma people is a long-standing phenomenon. In this study t...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... final coding scheme with examples of associations and a brief definition is presented in Table 2. ...Similar publications
Citations
... Recent empirical studies confirm that associating disgust with the Roma minority is not specific only to the Romanian population, but was also discovered in Greek (Asimopoulos et al., 2019), Czech (Creţan et al., 2022) or Slovakian samples (Petrík et al., 2021). Moreover, other studies suggest that such negative emotions amplify the negative attitudes of the majority. ...
... In this respect, while previous studies (Dasgupta et al., 2009) compared two different types of minorities (a sexual and an ethnic minority), we aim to investigate the specificity of the spill-over effect on the prejudice towards two ethnic minorities: the Roma and the Hungarian. The two minorities typically elicit different negative emotions in members of the Romanian majority: the Romani ethnics are associated with disgust (Asimopoulos et al., 2019;Petrík et al., 2021;Creţan et al., 2022), while the Hungarian minority generally elicits fear and resentment (Daftary and Grin, 2003). This provides an appropriate setting for testing the emotion-related specificity of the spill-over effects. ...
... Our sample was gender imbalanced, as the majority of our participants were females. We tested the influence of only one incidental emotion, i.e., disgust, which was found to be the emotion most commonly associated with the Roma minority (Petrík et al., 2021;Creţan et al., 2022). Nevertheless, previous studies have also found that other emotions can also increase prejudice. ...
Negative emotions such as disgust or anger influence the evaluation of minorities and amplify prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination behaviors towards them. However, new discoveries suggest that these spillover effects might be more specific in the sense that the bias might occur only if the emotions are specific to the affect that is generally evoked by that particular minority, i.e. anger increases prejudice towards anger-relevant groups, and disgust towards disgust-relevant groups. Our study aimed to examine, the specificity of the spillover effects, namely the importance of emotion’s relevance to the prejudice towards out-groups. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the influence of incidental disgust on the evaluation of two minorities, one that is usually associated with disgust (the Roma minority) and one usually associated with anger (the Hungarian minority). We used a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design where we manipulated the emotion experienced by the participants (disgust versus neutral) and the target they evaluated (Romani or Hungarian minority). We tested the effects of these manipulations on three aspects of prejudice toward the target group: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. The results support the specificity of the spillover effect, by showing that incidental disgust increased prejudice only towards the disgust-relevant target, namely the Roma minority, and that the intensity of this emotion experienced by the participants mediates this effect. Moreover, incidental disgust increased not only the negative emotions associated with the Romani (i.e., the affective component) but also the negative cognitions associated with them and the desire to maintain an increased social distance (i.e., behavioral prejudice). These findings highlight the importance of emotions’ relevance in bias toward minorities and provide a starting point for future anti-discrimination interventions.
