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

Development of intuitive rules: Evaluating the application of the dual-system framework to understanding children's intuitive reasoning

This is an author-created version of this article. The original source of publication is Psychon Bull Rev. 2006 Dec;13(6):935-53 The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF0321390

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

The adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for European Portuguese

This study presents the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999a) for European Portuguese (EP). The EP adaptation of the ANEW was based on the affective ratings made by 958 college students who were EP native speakers. Participants assessed about 60 words by considering the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in either a paper-and-pencil and a web survey procedures. Results of the adaptation of the ANEW for EP are presented. Furthermore, the differences between EP, American (Bradley & Lang, 1999a), and Spanish (Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, & Comesaña, 2007) standardizations were explored. Results showed that the ANEW words were understood in a similar way by EP, American, and Spanish subjects, although some sex and cross-cultural differences were observed. The EP adaptation of the ANEW is shown to be a valid and useful tool that will allow researchers to control and/or manipulate the affective properties of stimuli as well as to develop cross-linguistic studies. The normative values of EP adaptation of the ANEW can be downloaded at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.COMPETE - Programa Operacional Factores de CompetitividadeFundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional - FEDERQuadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional - QRENFundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - research project “Procura Palavras (P-Pal ): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words

Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association

Metaphor representation theory contends that people conceptualise their non-perceptual states (e.g., emotion concepts) in perceptual terms. The present research extends this theory to colour manipulations and discrete emotional representations. Two experiments (N=265) examined whether a red font colour would facilitate anger conceptions, consistent with metaphors referring to anger to “seeing red”. Evidence for an implicit anger-red association was robust and emotionally discrete in nature. Further, Experiment 2 examined the directionality of such associations and found that they were asymmetrical: Anger categorisations were faster when a red font colour was involved, but redness categorisations were not faster when an anger-related word was involved. Implications for multiple literatures are discussed

Centre–surround inhibition is a general aspect of famous-person recognition: evidence from negative semantic priming from clearly visible primes

A Centre-Surround Attentional Mechanism was proposed by Carr and Dagenbach (1990) to account for their observations of negative semantic priming from hard-to-perceive primes. The mechanism cannot account for the observation of negative semantic priming when primes are clearly visible. Three experiments (n = 30, 46, and 30) used a familiarity decision to names of famous people preceded by prime names of the same or different occupation. Negative semantic priming was observed at 150 or 200ms SOA with positive priming at shorter (50ms) and longer (1000ms) SOA. Experiment 3 verified that the primes were easily recognisable in the priming task at a SOA that yielded negative semantic priming, which cannot be predicted by the original Centre-Surround mechanism. A modified version is proposed that explains transiently negative semantic priming by proposing that Centre-Surround inhibition is a normal, automatically invoked aspect of the semantic processing of visually-presented famous names

How Awareness Changes the Relative Weights of Evidence During Human Decision-Making

A combined behavioral and brain imaging study shows how sensory awareness and stimulus visibility can influence the dynamics of decision-making in humans