Automatic Evaluation of Self and Significant Others: Affective Priming in Close Relationships

Abstract

The affective priming paradigm developed by Murphy and Zajonc (1993) was adapted to assess an automatic evaluative response to friends (n = 100) or romantic partners (n = 101). It was investigated how a brief presentation of the first names and faces of relationship partners modulated the evaluation of immediately following Chinese letters. The visibility of the primes was manipulated by either masking the primes or not. In the low visibility condition, the Chinese letters were more positively evaluated when they were preceded by the name or face of the relationship partner than when they were preceded by the participant's name or face. In the high visibility condition, a similar but stronger effect was found for face primes, and no effect for name primes. All priming effects were replicated for friends and romantic partners. The short-term stability of individual priming effects was low. No significant relations between priming effects and relationship satisfaction or attachment styles were found. The results suggest that affect is an integral part of the relationship schema, but that the amplitude of this evaluative reaction does not reflect individual differences in relationship satisfaction or attachment styles.