Masked first name priming increases effort-related cardiovascular reactivity

Abstract

Recent research on motivational intensity has shown that explicit manipulations of self-focused attention (e.g., mirrors and video cameras) increase effort-related cardiovascular responses during active coping. An experiment examined whether masked first name priming, an implicit manipulation of self-focused attention, had similar effects. Participants (n = 52 young adults) performed a self-paced cognitive task, in which they were told to get as many trials correct as possible within 5 minutes. During the task, the participant’s first name was primed for 0%, 33%, 67%, or 100% of the trials. First name priming, regardless of its frequency, significantly increased cardiovascular reactivity, particularly systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity. Furthermore, the priming manipulation interacted with individual differences in trait self-focus: trait self-focus predicted higher SBP reactivity in the 0% condition, but first name priming eliminated the effects of individual differences. Implications for self-awareness research and for the emerging interest in priming effects on effort are considered.

Effort deficits and depression: The influence of anhedonic depressive symptoms on cardiac autonomic activity during a mental challenge

“…People with higher DASS scores thought they did worse on the parity task, but objective performance was unaffected. Many tests of motivational intensity theory find correlations between physiological markers of effort and behavioral measures of performance (e.g., Silvia, McCord, & Gendolla, 2010); many more studies, including most of our group’s studies, find only weak or null correlations with performance (e.g., Silvia, Jones, Kelly, & Zibaie, 2011a, 2011b; Silvia, Kelly, Zibaie, Nardello, & Moore, 2013; Silvia, Moore, & Nardello, in press). How hard people try and how well they actually do are quite different.…”

Gritty people try harder: Grit and effort-related cardiac autonomic activity during an active coping challenge

“…Also known as self-paced, piece-rate, and do-your-best tasks, unfixed tasks allow people to work at their own pace and hence achieve as much or as little as they wish. For unfixed tasks, motivational intensity theory predicts that effort is solely a function of importance (Wright, 2008), a pattern that many experiments have found (e.g., Gendolla, Richter, & Silvia, 2008; Silvia, 2012; Silvia, Jones, Kelly, & Zibaie, 2011a). …”

“…We expect, given theorizing about grit, that grit influences effort primarily via the importance pathway. Many traits have been shown to affect effort by affecting the importance of success (e.g., Capa & Audiffren, 2009; Capa, Audiffren, & Ragot, 2008; Silvia, Jones, Kelly, & Zibaie, 2011b). When a goal is more valuable, meaningful, or relevant to the self-concept, people are willing to expend more effort when necessary (Gendolla & Richter, 2010).…”

Long-lasting effect of subliminal processes on cardiovascular responses and performance

“…To achieve this we exposed participants first to the primes and assessed then if this has effects on a subsequent learning task rather than integrating primes into a task to establish direct and short term effects-as frequently done in recent studies (Capa et al, 2011a;Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2010;Silvia et al, 2011). Based on the evaluative conditioning paradigm used by Aarts et al (2008aAarts et al ( , 2008b and Custers and Aarts (2007), three groups of students were exposed to 100 trials of subliminal primes before performing an easy or a difficult learning task (see Fig.…”

“…We surmise that this difference stems from the fact that in the current study, contrary to several studies in cognitive sciences, we used subliminal stimuli that are intrinsically related to people's goals and motivation. Recent studies used subliminal stimuli related to people's goals and motivation (Capa et al, 2011a;Gendolla and Silvestrini, 2010;Silvia et al, 2011) but were designed to show short term mobilization of effort (i.e., several seconds) during task performance.…”