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

Automatic Emotion-specific Effects of Emotion-Representations on Agency Appraisals

Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Hot politics? Affective responses to political rhetoric

Canonical theories of opinion formation attribute an important role to affect. But how and for whom affect matters is theoretically underdeveloped. We establish the circumplex model in political science as a theory of core affect. In this theory unconscious emotional processes vary in level (arousal, measured with skin conductance) and direction (valence, measured with facial electromyography). We theorize that knowledge, attitude extremity, and (in)congruence with political rhetoric explain variation in affective responses. In a large lab study (N = 397), participants watched video clips with left-wing or right-wing rhetoric on prominent issues. We find that people with extreme attitudes experience more arousal in response to political rhetoric and that political rhetoric incongruent with prior attitudes evokes negative affect. Moreover, we show that affective responses lead to opinion change, independent of self-reported emotions. We conclude by setting a research agenda for the alignment between affective and cognitive components of emotions and their consequences

Asian Americans respond less favorably to excitement (vs. calm)-focused physicians compared to European Americans

OBJECTIVES: Despite being considered a model minority, Asian Americans report worse health care encounters than do European Americans. This may be due to affective mismatches between Asian American patients and their European American physicians. We predicted that because Asian Americans value excitement (vs. calm) less than European Americans, they will respond less favorably to excitement-focused (vs. calm) physicians. METHOD: In Study 1, 198 European American, Chinese American, and Hong Kong Chinese community adults read a medical scenario and indicated their preference for an excitement-focused versus calm-focused physician. In Study 2, 81 European American and Asian American community college students listened to recommendations made by an excitement-focused or calm-focused physician in a video, and later attempted to recall the recommendations. In Study 3, 101 European American and Asian American middle-aged and older adults had multiple online encounters with an excitement-focused or calm-focused physician and then evaluated their physicians\u27 trustworthiness, competence, and knowledge. RESULTS: As predicted, Hong Kong Chinese preferred excitement-focused physicians less than European Americans, with Chinese Americans falling in the middle (Study 1). Similarly, Asian Americans remembered health information delivered by an excitement-focused physician less well than did European Americans (Study 2). Finally, Asian Americans evaluated an excitement-focused physician less positively than did European Americans (Study 3). CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that while physicians who promote and emphasize excitement states may be effective with European Americans, they may be less so with Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities who value different affective states

Implicit Social Influence

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Psychology, 2007Previous research has shown that people hold two kinds of attitudes, explicit attitudes, which are voluntary evaluations of things, and implicit attitudes, which are automatic evaluations that occur spontaneously and are difficult or impossible to control. Prior work has shown that social influence, whether it is intentional persuasion or incidental influence, usually leads the recipient of the influence to change his or her attitudes to be closer to the attitudes of the source of the influence. This work has focused on the effect of the explicit attitudes of the source of influence but ignored the possible effect of the source's implicit attitudes. Three studies examine the independent effect of the source's implicit attitude on a recipient in different social influence settings. In the first study, the implicit and explicit attitudes of a source towards a target were measured, and in the second two studies the implicit and explicit attitudes of the source were manipulated. In the first study, the recipient watched the source give a persuasive message about the target, in the second study the source described the target directly to the recipient, and in the third study, the recipient watched the source interacting with the target. Results revealed that implicit attitudes have an influence on a recipient, but in unexpected ways. In the first study, the sources' implicit attitudes led to a contrast effect on the recipients' explicit attitudes. In the second and third study the manipulation of the sources' attitudes did not work as expected, and the influence of the sources' implicit attitudes on the recipient was not detected. Thus, a person's implicit attitudes can influence another person's attitudes, but they must be strong and possibly naturally occurring. The conditions in which implicit attitudes lead to influence deserve further research

Subliminal perception of others’ physical pain induces personal distress rather than empathic concern

Acknowledgements We thank the members of the research group for their revising this paper. Funding This research was supported by Humanities and Social Science Research Youth Fund Project of the Ministry of Education (19YJC190021) Grants to Juan Song. The funding body has no further role in the design of the study, data collection, analysis, data interpretation, and writing of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The effect of similarity on evaluative priming: Higher similarity predicts stronger congruency effects

The evaluative priming paradigm aims to uncover the processes underlying evaluations. For this purpose, this paradigm presents a sequence of two or more stimuli varying on the valence dimension to which participants must provide a response. The “standard” evaluative priming effect is a relative facilitation of the required responses in congruent trials compared to incongruent trials. The following thesis argues that this evaluative priming effect depends on prime-target similarity, with higher similarity between prime and target leading to larger priming effects. Part one of this thesis presents a meta-analysis of existing data, which tests evidence for the impact of similarity on evaluative priming effects. This reanalysis is based on the assumption that positive information is overall more similar to other positive information than negative information is to other negative information. Thus, this analysis compares effects of positive and negative prime-target pairs. The results confirm that (similar) positive prime-target pairs elicit stronger priming effects than (dissimilar) negative prime-target pairs. This analysis involves a broad sample of stimuli and designs which supports the generalizability of this finding. However, the results are also in line with alternative interpretations attributing the valence asymmetries to other effects caused by valence (e.g., general inhibition). The following four experiments manipulate similarity either by selecting prime-target pairs based on pre-ratings or by presenting identical and non-identical prime-target pairs. All four experiments show that similar prime-target pairs create larger priming effects than dissimilar prime-target pairs. These findings have implications for our understanding of the evaluative priming paradigm, the use of evaluative priming as a measure of attitudes, and the conceptualization of the evaluative system. These implications will be discussed

Emotion word processing: evidence from electrophysiology, eye movements and decision making

A degree of confusion currently exists regarding how the emotionality of a textual stimulus influences its processing. Despite a wealth of research recently being conducted in the area, heterogeneity of stimuli used and methodologies utilized prevented general conclusion from being confidently drawn. This thesis aimed to clarify understanding of cognitive processes associated with emotional textual stimuli by employing well controlled stimuli in a range of simple but innovative paradigms. Emotion words used in this thesis were defined by their valence and arousal ratings. The questions asked here concerned early stages of processing of emotional words, the attention capturing properties of such words, any spill-over effects which would impact the processing of neutral text presented subsequently to the emotional material, and the effect of emotional words on higher cognitive processes such as attitude formation. The first experiment (Chapter 2) manipulated the emotionality of words (positive, negative, neutral) and their frequency (HF – high frequency, LF – low frequency) while ERPs were recorded. An emotion x frequency interaction was found, with emotional LF words responded to fastest, but only positive LF words responded to fastest. Negative HF words were also associated with a large N1 component. Chapter 3 investigated the attention-capturing properties of positive and negative words presented above and below a central fixation cross. The only significant effects appeared when a positive word was presented in the top condition, and a negative word in the bottom condition. Here saccade latencies were longer and there were a fewer number of errors made. Chapter 4 reports an eye tracking study which examined the effect of target words’ emotion (positive, negative, neutral) and their frequency (HF, LF). The pattern of results, produced in a variety of fixation time measurements such as first fixation duration and single fixation duration, was similar to those reported in Chapter 2. The existence of any spill-over effect of emotion onto subsequently presented neutral text was examined in a number of ways. Chapter 5 describes priming with emotional primes and neutral targets but no effect of emotion was found. Chapter 6 employed the same design as Chapter 4 but presented positive, negative or neutral sentences in the middle of neutral paragraphs. It was found that the positive sentences were read fastest, but the neutral sentences following the negative sentences were read faster than those following neutral sentences. Chapters 7 and 8 employed a version of the Velten mood-induction tool to examine the effect of mood when reading emotional text. Chapter 7 was a replication of Chapter 4 with 4 participant groups: positive, negative and neutral mood. While the neutral group showed similar results to those produced in Chapter 4, the positive group only fixated on the positive HF words faster, the negative group showed a frequency effect within each emotional word type, but within HF words positive words were viewed for less time than neutral words. Chapter 8 had participants read 4 product reviews and then afterwards rate each of the products on a set of semantic differentials. This was a 3 (mood: positive, negative, neutral) x 2 (message type: positive negative) x 2 (word type: positive negative). There was no effect of mood but positive messages were read quicker when they contained positive words and negative messages were read quicker when they contained negative words. Participants were asked to recommend each product to individuals in either a prevention in a promotion focus. When the focus was prevention there were additive effects of message and word type, but when the focus was positive there was an interaction, with the positive message conveyed using negative words being rated highest. The same pattern also emerged in the series of semantic differentials. Possible mechanisms to account for these findings are discussed, including many incarnations of McGinnies’s (1949) perceptual defense theory. Future studies should possibly aim to combine the current knowledge with motivational, goal-orientated models such as Higgins’s (1998) theory of regulatory focus

From changing cognitions to changing the context: a dual-route model of behaviour change

Existing theories of behaviour change in psychology and behavioural economics rely mostly on changing cognitions and incentives as a route to altering behavioural responses. We propose a more general reflective-automatic model (RAM), which postulates that, in addition to cognitive change, interventions can also rely exclusively on contextual change as an alternative route to behaviour change. RAM is a dual-process model which assumes that these two routes rely predominantly on different information processing systems – the reflective system is in charge of changing cognitions and the automatic system responds to changing the context. We also identify four processes: salience, norms, affect, and priming (SNAP), which can bring about behaviour change by relying mainly on the automatic system. The SNAP processes might be important targets for population-wide behaviour change initiatives and have important implications for psychological research, health promotion and policy analysisWorking Pape