A note on McGinnies' "Emotionality and perceptual defense."

A test of the perceptual defense hypothesis1

“…Considerable evidence for the occurrence of defensive mechanisms involving the misperception, distortion, or repression of visually presented material has appeared in the literature While methodological flaws were undoubtedly present in some early experiments, the perceptual defense controversy has more recently centered on the theoretical analysis of findings Eriksen and Browne (1956), for example, have proposed a theoretical approach in terms of behavior theory A similar approach has been used in the experiment reported in this paper for a reappraisal of one of the earliest and most controversiai perceptual defense experiments, that of McGinnies (1949) McGinnies found that visual recognition thresholds for socially taboo words were higher than those for nontaboo words His experiment was criticized by Howes and Solomon (1950) on two grounds In the first place, McGmnies failed to control the variable of word frequency, which has subsequently been shown to have a considerable influence on visual recognition thresholds (Banks, 1958, Solomon & Postman, 1952 Secondly, McGinnies did not m fact demonstrate that 5"s require a longer duration time to recognize taboo words, his 5's may have recognized these words as readily as nontaboo words, but have hesitated to report them…”

Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.

“…Postman (1953) seems to be one of the early workers to note its generality, while Howes and Solomon (1950) observed in their critique of McGinnies' (1949) perceptual defense experiment that the so-called "taboo" words he used as stimuli are particularly infrequent. However, the first systematic research effort that demonstrates the wordfrequency-word-value relationship is due to Johnson, Thomson, and Frincke (1960).…”

Sentence processing of taboo words: Evidence from eyetracking

“…Researchers do not agree on the cause of this effect (for a review, see Jay, 2009). Some argue for perceptual defense (McGinnies & Sherman, 1952); others claim that taboo words are rare and thus difficult to comprehend (Howes & Solomon, 1950); and others argue that comprehension is unaffected, but participants simply feel uncomfortable uttering taboo words (Zajonc, 1962). Since that time, McGinnies' original finding has been consistently observed and further explored: Comprehending taboo words delays ongoing cognitive processes such as those relating to attention (Anderson, 2005;Arnell, Killman, & Fijavz, 2007;Mathewson, Arnell, & Mansfield, 2008;Bertels, Kolinsky, & Morais, 2010), executive control (MacKay & Ahmetzanov, 2005;Mackay, et al, 2004), and language production (Motley, Baars, & Camden, 1983).…”