Priming and assimilation effects in the automatic activation of religious schema

摘要

The purpose of the present two experiments was to examine priming and assimilation effects of stored mental representations of religious constructs using two different tasks that activate self-concept. In the first experiment, participants were first primed with a religious exemplar (Jesus) or a religious stereotype (Christian). Next, participants responded using a lexical-decision task to word and nonword targets that were positively valenced emotion-laden religious targets, negatively valenced emotion-laden religious targets, sacred religious targets, and neutral (nonreligious) targets preceded by either self-primes or control primes. Participants in the exemplar condition exhibited assimilation effects to self-primes whereas individuals in the stereotype condition exhibited contrast effects to self-primes. These effects were independent of target type. Our second experiment was conducted to demonstrate priming and assimilation effects on participants' subsequent mood state using a location task. We found that individuals who were implicitly primed with negatively valenced targets exhibited higher levels of depression than individuals primed with the other target types. We also found strong correlations in our sample between measures of religious orientation and religiosity; however, these variables did not correlate with either reaction time (Experiment 1) or mood state (Experiment 2). Results are interpreted with respect to Active-Self theory and research in social cognition.