The effects of conscious and subconscious processing of hostility- or friendliness-related words on the personality impression of others.

Positive‐negative asymmetry of priming effects on impression formation

“…In Ikegami and Kawaguchi (1989), it was presumed that the conscious processing of friendly or hostile words might evoke the chronic expectancy that people would emit positive traits and behaviours in usual cases, which is well known as 'Polyanna hypothesis' (see Boucher and Osgood, 1969;Fiske, 1980). Consequently, the impact of positive priming words congruent with the expectancy was mitigated, but the impact of unexpected negative priming words was not.…”

“…Besides, several other studies suggest that the level of conscious awareness or the recallability of the priming events may influence the typical pattern of assimilation effects on the impression ratings (Lombardi, Higgins and Bargh, 1987;Martin, 1985Martin, , 1986Ikegami and Kawaguchi, 1989). It seems that the more consciously are priming stimuli processed, the less likely are assimilative effects to occur.…”

“…However, it is still questionable whether the subjects actually processed evaluative implications of the words under the conscious priming condition in Ikegami and Kawaguchi (1989). What the subjects had to do was just to decide whether a stimulus being presented was a jukugo word or not.…”

“…According to the reasoning of Ikegami and Kawaguchi (1989)' the evoked evaluative expectancy may circumvent or suppress the purely cognitive activation processes which are reflected in the symmetric assimilation effects in the subconscious priming condition. It is inferred that such evaluative information processing may occur when the prime words are processed consciously enough at least to identify 'what they are'.…”

“…A study by Ikegami and Kawaguchi (1989) was an attempt to relate the issue of consciousness with the positive-negative asymmetry of priming effects. They conducted a series of experiments, using a modification of Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982)'s paradigm.…”