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Priming researchers have long investigated how providing information about traits in one context can influence the impressions people form of social targets in another. The literature has demonstrated that this can have 3 different effects: Sometimes primes become incorporated in the impression of the target (assimilation), sometimes they are used as standards of comparison (anchoring), and sometimes they cause people to consciously alter their judgments (correction). In this article, we present meta-analyses of these 3 effects. The mean effect size was significant in each case, such that assimilation resulted in impressions biased toward the primes, whereas anchoring and correction resulted in impressions biased away from the primes. Additionally, moderator analyses uncovered a number of variables that influence the strength of these effects, such as applicability, processing capacity, and the type of response measure. Based on these results, we propose a general model of how irrelevant information can bias judgments, detailing when and why assimilation and contrast effects result from default and corrective processes.

This research examined the processes by which explicit and implicit attitudes changed to systematically differing levels of counterattitudinal (CA) information. Explicit attitudes changed quickly in response to relatively small amounts of CA information, reflecting rule-based reasoning. On the other hand, implicit attitudes changed more slowly in the face of CA information, reflecting the progressive accretion of evaluation-attitude object pairings. Thus, explicit attitudes were extremely malleable and changed quickly when CA information was presented, however, implicit attitudes revealed a slow, linear change trajectory resulting from the on-going accrual of information about the attitude object. Implications for the processes underlying implicit and explicit attitudes are discussed. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Understanding how people respond to counterattitudinal (CA) information has a long tradition in social psychological research on attitude change (e.g., Petty & Wegener, 1998), prejudice reduction (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaernter, 2000), and person memory (e.g., Srull & Wyer, 1989). Although many established models account for how people respond to CA information (i.e., information inconsistent with the valence of the initial information about a target), most of this research is based on participants' explicit, controllable reports of their attitudes. However, recent attitudes work has made a distinction between implicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes for which people do not initially have conscious access and for which activation cannot be controlled) and explicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes that people can report and for which expression can be consciously controlled). Additionally, a great deal of

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Given that familiarity is closely associated with positivity, the authors sought evidence for the idea that positivity would increase perceived familiarity. In Experiment 1, smiling and thus positively perceived novel faces were significantly more likely to be incorrectly judged as familiar than novel faces with neutral expressions. In Experiment 2, subliminal association with positive affect (a positively valenced prime) led to false recognition of novel words as familiar. In Experiment 3, validity judgments, known to be influenced by familiarity, were more likely to occur if participants were in happy mood states than neutral mood states. Despite their different paradigms and approaches, the results of these three studies converge on the idea that, at least under certain circumstances, the experience of positivity itself can signal familiarity, perhaps because the experience of familiarity is typically positive.