Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures.

1993-01-01articleJournal of Personality and Social Psychology1,323 citationsclosed

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

Social and Intergroup Psychology Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies Cognitive Science and Education Research

Abstract

The affective primacy hypothesis (R. B. Zajonc, 1980) asserts that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing. The present work tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of affective and cognitive priming under extremely brief (suboptimal) and longer (optimal) exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures only affective primes produced significant shifts in Ss' judgments of novel stimuli. These results suggest that when affect is elicited outside of conscious awareness, it is diffuse and nonspecific, and its origin and address are not accessible. Having minimal cognitive participation, such gross and nonspecific affective reactions can therefore be diffused or displaced onto unrelated stimuli. At optimal exposures this pattern of results was reversed such that only cognitive primes produced significant shifts in judgments. Together, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis.

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1,323 citations exist upstream.

References

1975Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

1980Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.

1968Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.

1971Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations.

1986On the automatic activation of attitudes.

1984On the primacy of affect.

1982Facial Reactions to Facial Expressions

Cited by

1998Attitude change: Multiple roles for persuasion variables.

2014The effect of social media communication on consumer perceptions of brands

1996The Role of Affect and Worldviews as Orienting Dispositions in the Perception and Acceptance of Nuclear Power1

2001Attachment theory and intergroup bias: Evidence that priming the secure base schema attenuates negative reactions to out-groups.

2006Understanding implicit and explicit attitude change: A systems of reasoning analysis.

2005The Automaticity of Affect for Political Leaders, Groups, and Issues: An Experimental Test of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis

2000On the Confluence of Self-Esteem Maintenance Mechanisms

2008The shared circuits model (SCM): How control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation, deliberation, and mindreading