Affective State, Attraction, and Affiliation: Misery Loves Happy Company, Too

Sixty male and 60 female subjects were made to feel relatively depressed or relatively elated prior to giving attraction responses toward a target person whose affective state was presented as sad, neutral, or happy. It was hypothesized that, consistent with the Byrne-Clore affective model of attraction, the more pleasant the affective state of the target, the more liking subjects would feel for that person and the more willing they would be to work with him/her. However, consistent with fear-affiliation research, it was also predicted that depressed subjects, relative to elated subjects, would find a depressed target to be a more desirable work partner. Results supported all these hypotheses.