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Evaluative conditioning and affective priming
- Steven Glautier
- Jan De Houwer
- Edward Redhead
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Description: Previous research suggests that evaluative conditioning (EC) is insensitive to contingency awareness, and insensitive to extinction and contingency manipulations. Recent studies have tested the generality of these EC results using physiological (startle reflex) and behavioural (affective priming) measures of affect rather than verbal ratings of liking. The current experiments used an affective priming measure to extend this program of work. Over four experiments we examined the role of awareness, the role of contingency, and the phenomena of cue-competition in evaluative conditioning. Each experiment involved subjects experiencing conditioned stimuli (CSs) paired with affectively valenced (positive and negative) visual images. Subjects then classified words as either positive or negative. Each word was preceded by presentation of a CS. It was found that subjects classified the words faster if the valence of the word was the same as that of the immediately preceding CS. However, this conditioning effect did not depend on contingency awareness, was not reduced by contingency degradation, and there was no evidence of cue-competition in a blocking procedure that used an overshadowing control.