The Affect Misattribution Procedure.

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) has been forwarded as one of the most promising alternatives to the Implicit Association Test and the evaluative-priming task for measuring attitudes such as prejudice indirectly. We investigated whether the AMP is indeed able to detect an evaluative out-group bias. In contrast to recent conclusions about the robustness of AMP effects, six out of seven pilot studies indicated that participants did not show any prejudice effects in the AMP. Yet, these pilot studies were not fully conclusive with regard to our research question because they investigated different domains of prejudice, used small sample sizes, and employed a modified AMP version. In a preregistered, high-powered AMP study, we therefore examined whether the standard AMP does reveal prejudice against Turks, the biggest minority in Germany, and found a significant, albeit very small prejudice effect. We discuss possible reasons for the AMP's weak sensitivity to evaluations in socially sensitive domains

Assessing children’s implicit attitudes using the Affect Misattribution Procedure

In the current research we examined whether the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne et al., 2005) could be successfully adapted as an implicit measure of children’s attitudes. We tested this possibility in three studies with 5 to 10 year old children. In Study 1 we found evidence that children misattribute affect elicited by attitudinally positive (e.g., cute animals) and negative (e.g., aggressive animals) primes to neutral stimuli (inkblots). In Study 2, we found that, as expected, children’s responses following flower and insect primes were moderated by gender. Girls (but not boys) were more likely to judge inkblots as pleasant when they followed flower primes. Children in Study 3 showed predicted affect misattribution following happy as compared to sad face primes. In addition, children’s responses on this child-friendly AMP predicted their self-reported empathy; the greater children’s spontaneous misattribution of affect following happy and sad primes, the more children reported feeling the joy and pain of others. These studies provide evidence that the AMP can be adapted as an implicit measure of children’s attitudes and the results of Study 3 offer novel insight into individual differences in children’s affective responses to the emotional expressions of other

Effects in the affect misattribution procedure are modulated by feature-specific attention allocation

We examined whether automatic stimulus evaluation as measured by the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is moderated by the degree to which attention is assigned to the evaluative stimulus dimension (i.e., feature-specific attention allocation, FSAA). In two experiments, one group of participants completed a standard AMP while attending to evaluative stimulus information. A second group of participants completed the AMP while attending to non-evaluative stimulus information. In line with earlier work, larger AMP effects were observed when participants were encouraged to attend to evaluative stimulus information than when they were not. These observations support the idea that the impact of FSAA on measures of automatic stimulus evaluation results from a genuine change in the degree of automatic stimulus evaluation rather than a change in the degree to which automatic stimulus evaluation is picked up by these measures

What drives priming effects in the affect misattribution procedure?

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is one of the most promising implicit measures to date, showing high reliability and large effect sizes. The current research tested three potential sources of priming effects in the AMP: affective feelings, semantic concepts, and prepotent motor responses. Ruling out prepotent motor responses as a driving force, priming effects on evaluative and semantic target responses occurred regardless of whether the key assignment in the task was fixed or random. Moreover, priming effects emerged for affect-eliciting primes in the absence of semantic knowledge about the primes. Finally, priming effects were independent of the order in which primes and targets were presented, suggesting that AMP effects are driven by misattribution rather than biased perceptions of the targets. Taken together, these results support accounts that attribute priming effects in the AMP to a general misattribution mechanism that can operate on either affective feelings or semantic concepts

Go with your gut! Effects of affect misattribution procedures become stronger when participants are encouraged to rely on their gut feelings

The Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is one of the leading examples of a class of tasks used to measure attitudes implicitly. Based on the idea that AMP effects occur because participants misattribute affective responses, we hypothesized that asking participants to focus on their affective, gut-level responses would increase the magnitude of AMP effects. In line with this prediction, results showed that participants who completed the AMP while "going with their gut" revealed AMP effects that were much larger than for participants who completed the AMP with standard instructions. This result supports the prevailing model of the AMP as being related to affective misattribution, and reveals a straightforward way to increase effect sizes in the AMP

Prevention of intention invention in the affect misattribution procedure

The affect misattribution procedure (AMP) is one of the most promising indirect measures, showing high reliability and large effect sizes. However, the AMP has recently been criticized for being susceptible to explicit influences, in that priming effects tend to be larger and more reliable among participants who report that they intentionally responded to the primes instead of the targets. Consistent with interpretations of these effects in terms of retrospective confabulation, two experiments obtained reliable priming effects when (a) participants lacked meta-cognitive knowledge about their responses to the primes and (b) participants’ attention was directed away from response-eliciting features of the primes. Under either of these conditions, priming effects were unrelated to self-reported intentionality, although self-reported intentionality was positively related to priming effects under control conditions. The findings highlight the contribution of meta-cognitive inferences to retrospective self-reports of intentionality and suggest an effective procedure to rule out explicit influences in the AMP

At the boundaries of misattribution: does positivity influence judgments of familiarity in the affect misattribution procedure?

Priming effects in the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) have been explained by a misattribution of prime-related affect to neutral targets. However, the measure has been criticized for being susceptible to intentional use of prime features in judgments of the targets. To isolate the contribution of unintentional processes, the present research expanded on the finding that positive affect can be misattributed to familiarity (i.e., positivity-familiarity effect). To the extent that prime-valence is deemed irrelevant for judgments of target-familiarity, positivity-familiarity effects in the AMP could potentially rule out intentional use of the primes. Seven experiments collectively suggest that prime-valence influences judgments of target-familiarity in the AMP, but only when the task context does not suggest a normatively accurate response to the familiarity-judgment task. Relations of positivity-familiarity effects to self-reported use of prime-valence revealed mixed results regarding the role of intentional processes. Implications for the AMP and misattribution effects are discussed

An inkblot for beliefs : the truth misattribution procedure

An increasing body of evidence shows the importance of accommodating relational information within implicit measures of psychological constructs. Whereas relational variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have been proposed in the past, we put forward the Truth Misattribution Procedure (TMP) as a relational variant of the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) that aims to capture implicit beliefs. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that TMP effects are sensitive to the relational information contained within sentence primes, both in the context of causal stimulus relations of a known truth value (e.g., “smoking causes cancer” vs. “smoking prevents cancer”) , as well as in the domain of gender stereotypes (e.g., “men are arrogant” vs. “men should be arrogant”). The potential benefits of the TMP are discussed

Implicit Measures of Homophobia and Stigmatization of Same-Sex Couples

abstract: While acceptance towards same-sex marriage is gradually increasing, same-sex marriage is banned in many states within the United States. Laws that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying have been shown to increase feelings of depression, exclusion, and stigma for same-sex attracted individuals. The intention of this study was to explore the effect both pro- and anti-same-sex marriage advertisements have on heterosexual individuals' implicit attitudes towards same-sex couples. It was predicted that exposure to anti-same-sex advertisements would lead to viewing same-sex couples as more unpleasant and heterosexual couples as being more pleasant. However, heterosexual participants who viewed anti-same-sex marriage ads were more likely to rate heterosexual couples as being unpleasant and same-sex couples as pleasant. It is theorized that viewing anti-same-sex marriage advertisements led heterosexual individuals to report heterosexual stimuli as being more unpleasant compared to same-sex stimuli as a form of defensive processing.Dissertation/ThesisM.S. Psychology 201