Interpersonal appraisals of emotionally distressed persons by anxious and dysphoric individuals.
Coyne [J. Abnorm. Psychol. 85 (1976a) 186; Psychiatry 29 (1976b) 28] first reported that depressed persons were negatively appraised interpersonally by interaction partners. The purpose of the current study was to replicate previous findings extending Coyne's theory to anxious individuals and to assess how anxiety and depression of the raters may affect these ratings. Anxious, dysphoric, and control participants watched a video of an actor portraying anxious, depressed, or neutral affect (n = 208). Results indicated that the actor portraying depressed affect was assessed more negatively than the actor portraying anxious affect who, in turn, was assessed more negatively than the actor portraying neutral affect. However, anxious and dysphoric participants did not differ from control participants in their ratings of the videos.