Operant evaluative conditioning.

Abstract

Two experiments investigated an evaluative transfer from actions producing pleasant and unpleasant outcomes to novel stimuli that were assigned to those actions in a subsequent stimulus-response task. Results showed that a fictitious social group was liked more when this group was assigned to the action previously associated with pleasant outcomes relative to the other action. This evaluative transfer from operant contingencies was observed although the actions did not generate outcomes during the stimulus-action pairing. It is concluded that operant contingencies can be used for preference construction because they specify the existence of a relation between specific actions and particular valenced events. Implications for mental process theories of preference formation and motivated perception are discussed.

Evaluative conditioning of artificial grammars: Evidence that subjectively-unconscious structures bias affective evaluations of novel stimuli.

“…The scale did not have a neutral point (i.e., zero was removed), because while piloting the task, participants reported that it felt strange to rate preference for meaningless strings of letters and had the tendency to give neutral ratings. Therefore, by removing the neutral point, we intended to constrain participants to attend even very subtle positive or negative feelings toward the strings (see Eder, Krishna, & Van Dessel, 2019, for a similar solution). After rating the string's valence, participants had to respond to an Awareness scale while the string was still on the screen.…”

Beyond inhibitory control training: Inactions and actions influence smartphone app use through changes in explicit liking.

“…Alternatively, an inferential account proposes that people infer their liking of objects from their own behavior (Van Dessel, Eder, & Hughes, 2018;Van Dessel et al, 2018b). According to this view, participants observed that they stopped for an app and that stopping is unpleasant, thus negatively adjusting their evaluation of the app (for a more elaborate discussion, see Eder et al, 2019). Uncovering the exact mech-anism of how GNG influences evaluations may improve future applied training tasks to elicit stronger effects (e.g., Van Dessel et al, 2018a).…”

Learning to Like or Dislike: Revealing Similarities and Differences Between Evaluative Learning Effects

“…This change in liking could be conceived of as an effect of a regularity in the presence of a neutral stimulus (brand name) and a positive (approach) or negative (avoid) behavior. Such effects have been referred to as operant evaluative conditioning (De Houwer, 2007; Eder, Krishna, & Van Dessel, 2019).…”