Evaluative conditioning: recent developments and future directions

CONTINGENCY AWARENESS; ATTITUDE-CHANGE; EFFECTS DEPEND; IMPLICIT; ASSOCIATION; DISLIKES; VALENCE; LIKES; US; MISATTRIBUTION; Automaticity; Evaluative conditioning; Functional definition; Mental process theorie

Facing one’s implicit biases:From awareness to acknowledgment

Expanding on conflicting theoretical conceptualizations of implicit bias, 6 studies tested the effectiveness of different procedures to increase acknowledgment of harboring biases against minorities. Participants who predicted their responses toward pictures of various minority groups on future implicit association tests (IATs) showed increased alignment between implicit and explicit preferences (Studies 1-3), greater levels of explicit bias (Studies 1-3), and increased self-reported acknowledgment of being racially biased (Studies 4-6). In all studies, effects of IAT score prediction were significant even when participants did not actually complete IATs. Effects of predicting IAT scores were moderated by nonprejudicial goals, in that IAT score prediction increased acknowledgment of bias for participants with strong nonprejudicial goals, but not for participants with weak nonprejudicial goals (Study 4). Mere completion of IATs and feedback on IAT performance had inconsistent effects across studies and criterion measures. Instructions to attend to one's spontaneous affective reactions toward minority group members increased acknowledgment of bias to the same extent as IAT score prediction (Study 6). The findings are consistent with conceptualizations suggesting that (a) implicit evaluations are consciously experienced as spontaneous affective reactions and (b) directing people's attention to their spontaneous affective reactions can increase acknowledgment of bias. Implications for theoretical conceptualizations of implicit bias and interventions that aim to reduce discrimination via increased acknowledgment of bias are discussed

When the method makes a difference: antagonistic effects on 'automatic evaluations' as a function of task characteristics of the measure

"Researchers often employ implicit measures as dependent variables to investigate processes of attitude formation and change. In such studies, experimentally induced differences are typically interpreted as reflecting change in automatic evaluations. We argue that experimentally induced effects on implicit measures may not always reflect genuine changes in evaluative responses, but can be driven by the mechanisms underlying the measurement procedure. In line with this assumption, the present research shows that these mechanisms can produce opposite effects of the same experimental manipulation for otherwise equivalent implicit measures. These results indicate that merely observing experimental effects on implicit measures does not allow direct inferences regarding changes in automatic evaluations. Instead, psychological interpretations of such effects hinge upon the mechanics of how a given measurement procedure responds to variations in the context. Implications for research using implicit measures are discussed." [author's abstract

When does contextual positivity influence judgments of familiarity? Investigating moderators of the positivity-familiarity effect

The positivity-familiarity effect suggests that people use positive affect as a cue to answer the question of whether they have encountered a stimulus before. Five experiments investigated this effect under various conditions. Positivity-familiarity effects were obtained irrespective of whether the task context suggested a correct answer to the question of whether a given target stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar. However, effects were less reliable when participants had a basis to assume that they had been presented with the target stimuli earlier in the same study and when they were asked to indicate whether the targets had been presented before (instead of judging them as familiar or unfamiliar). Positivity-familiarity effects were also obtained irrespective of whether affective primes were presented for short, moderate, or long durations. However, effects were less reliable for short compared to moderate and long prime presentations. Implications for the positivity-familiarity effect and other misattribution phenomena are discussed

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

Does explaining social behavior require multiple memory systems?

Amodio [1] argues that social cognition research has for many decades relied on imprecise dual-process models that build on questionable assumptions about how people learn and represent information. He presents an alternative framework for explaining social behavior as the product of multiple dissociable memory systems, based on the idea that cognitive neuroscience has revealed evidence for the existence of separate systems underlying distinct forms of learning and memory

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

Cognitive vulnerability to anxiety: A review and an integrative model.

Consistent research evidence supports the existence of threat-relevant cognitive bias in anxiety, but there remains controversy about which stages of information processing are most important in the conferral of cognitive vulnerability to anxiety. To account for both theoretical and empirical discrepancies in the literature, an integrative multi-process model is proposed wherein core assumptions of dual-systems theories from social and cognitive psychology are adapted to explain attentional and interpretive biases in the anxiety disorders. According to the model, individual differences in associative and rule-based processing jointly influence orientation, engagement, disengagement, and avoidance of threat-relevant stimuli, as well as negatively-biased interpretation of ambiguous stimuli in anxious populations. By linking anxiety-related symptoms to basic principles of information processing, the model parsimoniously integrates different kinds of cognitive biases in anxiety, providing a useful framework for future research and clinical intervention