Affective priming, also called affect priming, is a type of response
priming
Priming may refer to:
* Priming (agriculture), a form of seed planting preparation, in which seeds are soaked before planting
* Priming (immunology), a process occurring when a specific antigen is presented to naive lymphocytes causing them to di ...
and was first proposed by
Russell H. Fazio.
This type of priming entails the evaluation of people, ideas, objects, goods, etc., not only based on the physical features of those things, but also on affective context. The affective context may come from previous life experiences, and therefore, primes may arouse emotions rather than ideas. Most research and concepts about affective priming derive from the affective priming paradigm, which looks to make judgments of neutral affective targets following positive, neutral, or negative primes. A prominent derivation of affective priming paradigm is the
Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), developed by Payne, Cheng, Govorun, and Stewart. The main idea of AMP is to measure
implicit attitude
Implicit attitudes are evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards an attitude object or the self. These evaluations are generally either favorable or unfavorable and come about from various influences in the individual experience. T ...
s, therefore, if the evaluation of the prime stimuli of an object is positive, it is said that the person has a positive attitude toward the object exposed.
Affective priming paradigm
The intent of this affective priming paradigm had initially the intent of eliminating the bias created by affective priming research self-reports.
As a consequence, Fazio created the affective priming paradigm, which focuses on the evaluation of automatic
stimuli
A stimulus is something that causes a physiological response. It may refer to:
* Stimulation
** Stimulus (physiology), something external that influences an activity
** Stimulus (psychology), a concept in behaviorism and perception
* Stimulus (eco ...
. One finding of studies that use this paradigm says that “performance is typically faster and more accurate when a prime and target are congruent and have the same emotional information (e.g., “flower”–“wedding”) compared with when they are incongruent and have different emotional information (e.g., “party’ –“corpse”).”
Affective automatic response
Affective priming has been long said to be related to implicit attitudes . Some research suggests that affective priming is triggered by multiple, simultaneous mechanisms. Added to this, it has found that deeper processing of the target being evaluated can significantly hinder the influence of the prime. On the other hand, deeper processing prime significantly increases the prime's influence and it is retrieved more easily in subsequent occasions.
There is still a great need of research related to affective priming and
automatic processing. Some arguments in favor of a strong relationship between the two argue that these affective priming processes 1) lack
intentionality
''Intentionality'' is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it ha ...
, 2) are highly
efficient, 3) have reduced
controllability Controllability is an important property of a control system, and the controllability property plays a crucial role in many control problems, such as stabilization of unstable systems by feedback, or optimal control.
Controllability and observabil ...
, 4) are triggered at a high speed, especially when there is a motivationally relevant stimulus, and 5) there is reduced awareness of the origin, meaning, and occurrence of the response.
Seib-Pfeifer and Gibbons have suggested that affective priming processing is linked to the right central-to-parieto-occipital positive slow wave (PSW).
Other factors that contribute to this relationship between affective priming and automatic processing include switching tasks,
salience asymmetry,
and potentially strategic recoding.
Valence vs arousal
There is much discussion in the world of psychology about the effects of
valence and
arousal
Arousal is the physiological and psychological state of being awoken or of sense organs stimulated to a point of perception. It involves activation of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) in the brain, which mediates wakefulness, th ...
in affect priming, since they both seem to affect it, but there has been little research on which of the two has a greater effect on this type of priming. For example, one study by Yao, Shu, and Luo asserts that valence has a greater effect, based on their findings regarding the stability of valence-driven priming effects against arousal-driven effects and their information in the semantic system.
References
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Social psychology
Cognitive psychology