Does sunshine prime loyal … or summer? Effects of associative relatedness on the evaluative priming effect in the valent/neutral categorisation task

Abstract

After 30 years of research, the mechanisms underlying the evaluative priming effect are still a topic of debate. In this study, we tested whether the evaluative priming effect can result from (uncontrolled) associative relatedness rather than evaluative congruency. Stimuli that share the same evaluative connotation are more likely to show some degree of non-evaluative associative relatedness than stimuli that have a different evaluative connotation. Therefore, unless associative relatedness is explicitly controlled for, evaluative priming effects reported in earlier research may be driven by associative relatedness instead of evaluative relatedness. To address this possibility, we performed an evaluative priming study in which evaluative congruency and associative relatedness were manipulated independently from each other. The valent/neutral categorization task was used to ensure evaluative stimulus processing in the absence of response priming effects. Results showed an effect of associative relatedness but no (overall) effect of evaluative congruency. Our findings highlight the importance of controlling for associative relatedness when testing for evaluative priming effects.(160 words)

The Challenge of Diagnostic Inferences From Implicit Measures: The Case of Non-Evaluative Influences in the Evaluative Priming Paradigm

“…Analogous to the relatedness-proportion effect in semantic priming (Neely, Keefe & Ross, 1989), the advantage of congruent over incongruent trials may be 3. The influence of semantic relations rather than evaluative congruency is also found by other researchers; for example, Werner, von Ramin, Spruyt, and Rothermund (2018) arrive at a similar conclusion for semantic associations: "The additional finding of a significant influence of (nonevaluative) associative relatedness among the valent prime-target pairs highlights the possibility that these associations might feign an evaluative priming effect if not properly controlled for." reduced, eliminated, or reversed if prime valence is negatively correlated with target valence across the stimulus series; that is, if incongruent trials are more frequent than congruent trials.…”

Degree and Complexity of Non-conscious Emotional Information Processing – A Review of Masked Priming Studies

“…Therefore, as already noted above, encoding facilitation effects can only be unequivocally shown if the task is changed to a lexical decision, naming, or semantic decision task where the target category is orthogonal to valence. There is a long-standing debate on whether encoding facilitation effects can be found at all with such non-evaluative tasks, that is, even with clearly visible primes (see Hermans et al, 1994 ; Bargh et al, 1996 ; Giner-Sorolla et al, 1999 ; Glaser and Banaji, 1999 ; De Houwer et al, 2001 , 2002 ; Klauer and Musch, 2001 ; De Houwer and Randell, 2002 , 2004 ; Spruyt et al, 2002 , 2004 ; Wentura and Frings, 2008 ; Schmitz and Wentura, 2012 ; Klauer et al, 2016 ; Werner et al, 2018 ). While a review of this debate is beyond the scope of this article, for the sake of completeness we will review those (few) studies that have used masked primes in a non-evaluative task.…”

Automatic stimulus evaluation depends on goal relevance.

“…Third, the present findings are difficult to explain in terms of associative relatedness. Both Klauer et al (2016) and Werner et al (2017) argued that evaluative and associative relatedness may have been confounded in earlier studies showing reliable evaluative priming effects in the absence of dimensional overlap between the prime set and the response set (see also Hermans et al, 2002). It is certainly true that associative relatedness is an important confounding factor that has been overlooked in evaluative priming research in general (but see Hermans et al, 2002).…”