The present study aimed at exploring conditions when negative mood effects on person judgments would particularly be moderated. Self-referent and other-referent sentence completion tasks were used as a priming tool to induce negative affective states in subjects. Under the self-referent priming condition, subjects were led to focus their attention to negative aspects of their own self, while under the other-referent priming condition their attention was made directed toward negative aspects of others. After the sentence completion tasks, all the subjects participated in an impression formation task where they rated an ambiguously described target person on several trait scales. As a result, it was found that the negative mood biased subjects' impressions of the target in the negative direction, but that the mood effects were less prevailing when negative affects were elicited by self-referent priming tasks than by other-referent priming tasks. The results were discussed in terms of the Bower and Cohen (1982) 's“blackboard”model, which assumes a mechanism for accommodating the emotional influences upon social judgments, depending on the differences in emotional sources.