Attentional influences on affective priming: Does categorisation influence spontaneous evaluations of multiply categorisable objects?

Abstract

Previous research suggests that spontaneous evaluative responses to a stimulus depend on how that stimulus is categorised. The present research indicates that such categorisation effects depend on task-specific aspects of the measure, thereby concealing or overriding effects of unattended category cues. Results showed that affective priming effects in a paradigm based on response interference depended on participants' attention to the category membership of the primes. These effects were reflected in: (a) reduced effect sizes; (b) reduced internal consistencies; and (c) reduced correlations to corresponding self-reports when attention was directed toward alternative categories. Such attention-related decrements were not obtained for a priming paradigm based on affect misattribution, which showed reliable priming effects irrespective of participants' attention to the relevant categories. These results challenge the ubiquity of categorisation effects on spontaneous evaluations, suggesting that the impact of unattended category cues depends on conditions inherent in specific tasks.