Facing unconscious biases: Positive mood boosts gender‑stereotype activation from subliminal primes

Research has demonstrated that mood states can shape the extent to which people access and rely on social knowledge, including gender stereotypes. However, little is known about whether mood modulates the automatic activation of such stereotypes outside conscious awareness. Here, we present the first electrophysiological evidence that a positive mood enhances the automatic activation of gender stereotypes triggered by socially relevant masked cues. Forty women were induced into positive and negative moods using affectively evocative films. A subliminal priming paradigm was employed in which masked female and male faces served as primes and stereotypically feminine and masculine words served as targets. Participants completed both a semantic discrimination task and a lexical decision task. Electrophysiological data revealed that stereotypically incongruent compared to congruent prime–target pairs elicited larger N400-like and P300-like responses in the semantic discrimination task, but only under a positive mood. No stereotype-related effects emerged under a negative mood or in the lexical decision task. These findings indicate that a positive mood enhances the rapid, automatic activation of gender-related associations triggered by subliminal gender cues, demonstrating that affective states can shape social–semantic processing even in the absence of conscious awareness.