This article is based on a doctoral dissertation conducted by Sara M. Baker under the supervision of Richard E. Petty.The advice of committee members William von Hippel and Gifford Weary is acknowledged with thanks. We are also grateful to the 1989-1991 Ohio State Groups for Attitudes and Persuasion for their comments on this research and to Melissa Beers for her help in conducting both experiments.

The role of counterfactuals in judgments of affective reactions to outcomes was examined. Subjects read about individuals who experienced gains or losses as a result of either deciding to take action and make a change or deciding not to take any new action. In addition, the salience of the counterfactual alternative was manipulated. Past results were replicated in the case of negative outcomes: Individuals who lost money on the basis of action were judged as feeling worse than those who lost money on the basis of inaction. This occurred under both high and low salience of the counterfactual. With positive consequences, however, exaggerated affect for outcomes associated with action rather than inaction occurred only when the counterfactual alternative was made highly salient. Implications for the construction and use of counterfactuals are discussed, and a process model is developed on the basis of the data and the proposed conceptualization.

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This study examined characteristics associated with the global racial category "Blacks" and with several subtypes of the racial category: "streetwise, `"ghetto," "welfare," "athlete, "and "businessman. " Subjects were provided with one label and were asked to generate chtaracteristics commonly associated with it. Subjects' responses were submitted to discriminant function analysis, which provides information concerning the relation of characteristics listed by subjects to dimensions that explain the variance in subjects' responses and provides measures of the degree of overlap among the subtypes. The analysis revealed three dimensions: a negative/positive dimension, an athletic dimension, and a unique characteristic dimension. There were many classification errors for the "streetwise," "welfare," and "ghetto" subtypes but few classification errors for the "businessman " and "athlete " subtypes. The global stereotype, with its partial overlap with many of the subtypes, produced a moderate number of classification errors. Discriminant function analysis as a tool for studying subtyping is discussed.

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