When fair is foul and foul is fair: Reverse priming in automatic evaluation.

Abstract

Responses to information were facilitated by the rapid prior presentation of evaluatively congruent material. This fundamental discovery (R. H. Fazio, D. M. Sanbonmatsu, M. C. Powell, & F. R. Kardes, 1986) marked a breakthrough in research on automatic information processing by demonstrating that evaluative meaning is grasped without conscious control. Experiments employing a word naming task provided stringent tests of the automaticity of evaluation and found support for it. More strikingly, a previously unobserved reversal of these effects (i.e., slower responses to evaluatively matched rather than mismatched items) was found when primes were evaluatively extreme. Procedural variances across 6 experiments revealed that the reverse priming effect was highly robust. This discovery is analogous to demonstrations of contrast effects in controlled judgments. It is theorized that the reverse priming effect reflects an automatic correction for the biasing influence of the prime.

Evidence for the automatic evaluation of self-generated actions

“…This finding is in accordance with results from evaluative priming studies using external stimuli as primes that already reported blunted priming effects in high anxious participants (Berner & Maier, 2004;Glaser & Banaji, 1999;Maier, Berner, & Pekrun, 2003). It is also consistent with previous action-monitoring studies which have…”

Evaluative priming reveals dissociable effects of cognitive versus physiological anxiety on action monitoring.

“…In other words, while we hypothesized that worry could interfere with the rapid affective tagging of actions selectively, we reckoned that anxious arousal could increase PES specifically, revealing a functional dissociation between these two components of anxiety during action monitoring. Further, because previous studies already found blunted priming effects associated with (trait) anxiety irrespective of action monitoring (Berner & Maier, 2004;Glaser & Banaji, 1999;Maier, Berner, & Pekrun, 2003), we also included a control task in Experiment 1 where a standard cue-target priming sequence (with external stimuli) was used. As external visual primes, we used angry and happy faces extracted from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces set (AKDEF; Lundqvist, Flykt & Öhman, 1998).…”

Strength of visual percept generated by famous faces perceived without awareness: Effects of affective valence, response latency, and visual field

“…Modification of the strength of the consciously experienced visual percept would require some time to become apparent, being dependent on feedback projections. Also, there is evidence from the affective priming literature that automatic effects of stimulus valence are transient (De Houwer, Hermans, & Eelen, 1998;Glaser & Banaji, 1999;Hermans, de Houwer, & Eelen, 1994Klauer, Rossnagel, & Musch, 1997;see Fazio, 2001, for a review). Applying these concepts to the present experiments, the activation of affective valence associated with a famous face was expected to modulate the strength of the visual percept within a range of response latencies, not including very fast or slower latencies.…”