Assimilation and contrast effects in suboptimal affective priming paradigm

摘要

Contemporary psychology does not question the existence of psychological processes that operate outside human conscious awareness, such as implicit stereotypes (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Nosek et al., 2009), implicit attitudes (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995), automatically activated goals or norms (Bargh, 1997; Bargh and Chartrand, 2000; Bargh et al., 2001; Dijksterhuis et al., 2005), and implicit primary affect (Zajonc, 1980, 2004; Murphy and Zajonc, 1993; Murphy et al., 1995; Jarymowicz and Kobylińska, 2005; Winkielman et al., 2005; Kobylińska and Karwowska, 2007). Most data showing implicit affective stimuli influence on evaluative judgments, come from experiments conducted in an affective priming paradigm. The paradigm was introduced by Murphy and Zajonc (1993) who presented evidence for the existence of unconscious primary affect (Zajonc, 1980) and its influence on cognition. In their original experiments they presented neutral target stimuli (for example Chinese ideographs), which were preceded by either 1-s or 4-ms exposures of photographs of faces expressing either positive or negative emotions. The results showed that suboptimal (4 ms) affective primes induced affect that influenced evaluations of the neutral targets. Ideographs primed by negative facial expressions were judged more negatively than those primed by positive ones. Interestingly, neither the facial expression nor even the presence of any image was accessible to the participants' awareness. In contrast to suboptimal affective primes, both optimal affective primes (exposed for 1 s) and affectively neutral suboptimal primes (e.g., geometric figures of different shapes) failed to influence the participants' judgments about targets.