Infrahumanization studies have verified that people attribute uniquely human characteristics to their ingroup and restrict this possibility to outgroups. The aim of this study is to determine whether pleasant or unpleasant physical contexts change the norms of outgroup infrahumanization. Therefore, participants were presented a task involving the visual recognition of words preceded by images that were manipulated in terms of the physical context in which ingroup and outgroup pictures appeared. The results show that there is a greater association between ingroup and secondary emotions than between outgroup and secondary emotions when the background is a pleasant context. This difference disappears when they are presented in an unpleasant physical context. These results show the importance of physical contexts in group identity.
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