Impairment and enhancement of attraction by varying the CS-UCS relationship.

摘要

oes the CS-UCS relationship in interpersonal attraction determine the extent to which attraction will be learned? Reinforcement-context theory (Cramer, Weiss, Steigleder, & Balling, 1985) predicts that when a person (A) is presented prior to attitudinal agreement (forward conditioning), Person A acquires the capacity to function as a social stimulus who blocks (impairs) the acquisition of attraction to a novel person(X). Conversely, when attitudinal agreement is presented prior to Person A (backward conditioning), Person A acquires the capacity to function as a social stimulus who supernormally conditions (enhances) attraction to novel Person X. Two similar designs were used, in each of which Person A is associated with agreement in the first phase and both Person A and Person X are associated with agreement in compound (AX) in the second phase. In Experiment 1, Person A was presented before the attitudinal agreement, which reduced attraction to Person X (p