Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.

Abstract

The affective primacy hypothesis (R. B. Zajonc, 1980) asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. The present work tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of affective and cognitive priming under extremely brief (suboptimal) and longer (optimal) exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures only affective primes produced significant shifts in Ss' judgments of novel stimuli. These results suggest that when affect is elicited outside of conscious awareness, it is diffuse and nonspecific, and its origin and address are not accessible. Having minimal cognitive participation, such gross and nonspecific affective reactions can therefore be diffused or displaced onto unrelated stimuli. At optimal exposures this pattern of results was reversed such that only cognitive primes produced significant shifts in judgments. Together, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis.

Fearful expressions gain preferential access to awareness during continuous flash suppression.

“…Behavioral findings further suggest that emotional stimuli can influence performance on certain tasks even when participants are not consciously aware of the stimuli. Studies using subliminal priming have shown that reaction time is faster when the prime and target are congruent in valence (Bargh et al, 1992) and similarly, subliminal priming effects have been reported with novel, nonrepresentational stimuli presented as targets (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993;Wong & Root, 2003). Importantly, under conditions of restricted attentional resources, emotional stimuli are able to reach conscious awareness even when neutral stimuli cannot (Anderson, 2005;Milders et al, 2006).…”

Obesity, food restriction, and implicit attitudes to healthy and unhealthy foods: Lessons learned from the implicit relational assessment procedure

“…For instance, in nearly every study to date, researchers have relied on an Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST;De Houwer, 2003) or an affective priming task (AP; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) to measure automatic foodrelated cognition. Although IAT, EAST and AP effects indicate the extent to which one set of concepts (e.g., 'unhealthy foods' and 'healthy foods') are related to a second set of concepts (e.g., good or bad adjectives), they do not provide any information about the specific manner in which those concepts are related.…”

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

“…There is much evidence that facial expressions can be detected pre-consciously and can influence psychophysiological and behavioural responses without awareness of the particular expression (e.g., Dimberg & Ohman, 1996;Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000;Johnsen & Hugdahl, 1991Mogg & Bradley, 1999;Murphy & Zajonc, 1993;Niedenthal, 1990;Ohman, Esteves, & Soares, 1995;Robinson, 1998;Saban & Hugdahl, 1999;Whalen et al, 1998;Wong, Shevrin, & Williams, 1994). All of these studies presented masked faces for very brief exposure duration (target-to-mask stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA] of less than 35 ms).…”