Implicit Evaluations Research Articles

Do researchers practice what they preach? An empirical analysis of evaluation criteria

In our project, we take part in the debate about evaluation criteria in qualitative management and organisational science (MOS) research. Since the use of quantitative research criteria to evaluate qualitative research, as well as specific theoretically derived qualitative criteria, has been criticised, we look at this topic from an empirical perspective. Based on a comprehensive analysis of 449 articles published from 2011 to 2021 in five top-tier MOS-journals (Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal), we analyse how researchers address the issues of rigor and quality. Focusing on the most common evaluation criteria in the articles (validity and trustworthiness), our results indicate that scholars use qualitative evaluation criteria in a pragmatic way. This shows that, in contrast to the epistemological and methodological differences in theoretically derived evaluation criteria, researchers apply similar techniques to ensure validity and trustworthiness. Given that we only had access to published articles demonstrating the state of the art of using evaluation criteria, the current use of evaluation criteria during the research process remains a ‘black box.’ Therefore, to uncover such implicit evaluation criteria, we suggest a follow-up interview study to gain a deeper understanding of this relevant ‘black box’. In doing so, we aim to explore the intentions and experiences of authors who published qualitative research in top-tier journals on the question, “How to deal with evaluation criteria in research practice as well as during the review process?”. As publishing articles in leading journals is very competitive, we argue that these criteria are mainly the outcome of institutional practices, such as the review process and editorial policies. Our follow-up interview study proposes a way to shed light not only on the explicitly mentioned criteria in published articles but also on the underlying implicit criteria in-use during the research process up to publication.

Symmetry as an Inter-Cultural Feature Constituting Beauty: Implicit and Explicit Beauty Evaluation of Visual Symmetry in Japan

Symmetry has been recognized as one of the most important visual features to predict aesthetic preferences and was discussed as a potentially universal feature of beauty judgments. Recent studies have challenged such universality claims, by showing that art experts prefer asymmetric stimuli in explicit evaluations, suggesting that artistic training might modify the preference for symmetry. In the present study, we examine whether cultural habituation might also influence beauty judgments in regard to symmetry in abstract visual patterns. Given the traditional preference for asymmetry in Japanese art and design, we tested if Japanese participants ( N = 31) evaluate symmetric abstract visual patterns as more beautiful than asymmetric ones in explicit and implicit (IAT) tasks. We found that Japanese participants clearly evaluated symmetric stimuli as more beautiful than asymmetric ones. We conclude that cultural habituation with asymmetry—in contrast to artistic training—did not cause higher beauty ratings for asymmetry.

Judging Guilt: Implicit Evaluations of Defendants Predict Verdicts

Cognitive jurisprudence research that has used indirect measures has mostly focused on how people’s implicit biases (e.g., race) predict people’s verdicts for an individual belonging to an out-group. We aim to expand on this work by investigating implicit evaluations’ predictive strength for verdicts using an impression formation approach. In three preregistered studies, we presented mock jurors with a fictional murder trial in which the evidence against a defendant was mixed: some witnesses provided testimony suggesting guilt, whereas others sowed doubt. In all studies, implicit evaluations of the defendant, operationalized by the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) scores, uniquely predicted verdicts above and beyond explicit evaluations (Studies 1–3), the reason for evidence exclusion (Study 2), and demographics of the defendant (Study 3). These findings advance our understanding of implicit social cognition by demonstrating that implicit evaluations, operationalized by the AMP scores, can have predictive power in complex, ecologically rich contexts.

How do explicit and implicit evaluations shift? A preregistered meta-analysis of the effects of co-occurrence and relational information.

Based on 660 effect sizes obtained from 23,255 adult participants across 51 reports of experimental studies, this meta-analysis investigates whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (indirectly revealed) evaluations reflect relational information (how stimuli are related to each other) over and above co-occurrence information (the fact that stimuli have been paired with each other). Using a mixed-effects metaregression, relational information was found to dominate over contradictory co-occurrence information in shifting both explicit (mean Hedges' g = 0.97, 95% CI [0.89, 1.05], 95% PI [0.24, 1.70]) and implicit evaluations (g = 0.27, 95% CI [0.19, 0.35], 95% PI [-0.46, 1.00]). However, considerable heterogeneity in relational effects on implicit evaluation made moderator analyses necessary. Implicit evaluations were particularly sensitive to relational information (a) in between-participant (rather than within-participant) designs; when (b) co-occurrence information was held constant (rather than manipulated); (c) targets were novel (rather than known); implicit evaluations were measured (d) first (rather than last) and (e) using an affect misattribution procedure (rather than an Implicit Association Test or evaluative priming task); and (f) relational and co-occurrence information were presented in temporal proximity (rather than far apart in time). Overall, the present findings suggest that both implicit and explicit evaluations emerge from a combination of co-occurrence information and relational information, with relational information usually playing the dominant role. Critically, variability in these effects highlights a need to refocus attention from existence proof demonstrations toward theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and boundary conditions of the influences of co-occurrence and relational information on explicit and implicit evaluations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion and opinion in online tabloids and broadsheets

This paper is a corpus-based study focusing on implicit evaluation expressed in newspaper discourse, namely, the semantic mapping of emotion and opinion. The corpus, compiled of online “front page” newspaper articles from both selected tabloids (The Sun, The Express, The Mirror) and broadsheets (The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent) was used to answer three research questions: 1) Is evaluation markedly expressed in newspaper discourse? 2) What linguistic means are typical for construing evaluation in newspaper discourse? 3) Is there a difference between the tabloids and the broadsheets regarding the way in which/how evaluation is conveyed/employed? To answer these questions, a pilot keyword study on only six articles was carried out (one article from each of the aforementioned newspapers). The findings confirmed the importance of adjectives in expressing evaluation. Following this, a large study was conducted to detect local grammar adjectival lexicogrammatical patterns, introduced by Hunston (2000) and further amended by Bednarek (2007, 2009). These patterns, which are known for carrying the evaluative load, were analyzed in terms of frequency and function. It was observed that there is a difference in expressing evaluation between the tabloids and the broadsheets. However, more significant differences were found between the broadsheet newspapers themselves.

Peculiarities of Advertising Information Representation in the English-Language Mass Media Discourse

The relevance of the study is driven by the role of advertising as a genre of mass media discourse in the formation of collective and individual conceptual and linguistic pictures of the world, the conceptual system of the subject of interpretation of the world around him, human consciousness, structuring, formation and transformation of knowledge about the world, and interpretation of knowledge. The research material was modern English-language advertising messages on the English-language Internet. The analysis of the practical material has shown that although the analyzed advertising messages do not directly indicate the evaluation of a product or commodity, it is still implicitly traced: some advertising messages advertise high-quality, new products, while others contain an appeal. It is concluded that the linguistic interpretation of advertising messages is represented by three types: selective, classifying, and evaluative. When interpreting an advertising message, a person, as a representative of a certain society, chooses in his or her mind those units of knowledge about an object of the surrounding world that he or she possesses. In other words, selective conceptualization takes place, which means that the selective function of interpretation is realized. The classifying type of linguistic interpretation implies an appeal to certain emotions and feelings of the subject of interpretation, as well as the division of goods into categories (tasty, useful, high-quality, new), which is evident in advertising messages. It has been proven that the implicit evaluation of goods and services as objects of interpretation indicates the evaluative type of linguistic interpretation.

Iterative Calculation of Characteristic Modes Using Arbitrary Full-Wave Solvers

An iterative algorithm is adopted to construct approximate representations of matrices describing the scattering properties of arbitrary objects. The method is based on the implicit evaluation of scattering responses from iteratively generated excitations. The method does not require explicit knowledge of any system matrices (e.g., stiffness or impedance matrices) and is well-suited for use with matrix-free and iterative full-wave solvers, such as FDTD, FEM, and MLFMA. The proposed method allows for significant speed-up compared to the direct construction of a full transition matrix or scattering dyadic. The method is applied to the characteristic mode decomposition of arbitrarily shaped obstacles of arbitrary material distribution. Examples demonstrating the speed-up and complexity of the algorithm are studied with several commercial software packages.

The influence of instructions on generalised valence – conditional stimulus instructions after evaluative conditioning update the explicit and implicit evaluations of generalisation stimuli

ABSTRACT Generalisation in evaluative conditioning occurs when the valence acquired by a conditional stimulus (CS), after repeated pairing with an unconditional stimulus (US), spreads to stimuli that are similar to the CS (generalisation stimuli, GS). CS evaluations can be updated via CS instructions that conflict with prior conditioning (negative conditioning + positive instruction). We examined whether CS instructions can update GS evaluations after conditioning. We used alien stimuli where one alien (CSp) from a fictional group was paired with pleasant US images and another alien (CSu) from a different group was paired with unpleasant US images. The other members from the two groups were used as GSs. After conditioning, participants received negative CSp instructions and positive CSu instructions. In Experiment 1, explicit and implicit GS evaluations were measured before and after the instructions. In Experiment 2, we used a between-participants design where one group received positive/negative CS instructions while a control group received neutral instructions. In both experiments, the positive/negative CS instructions caused a reversal of explicit GS evaluations and an elimination of implicit GS evaluations. The findings suggest that generalised evaluations can change after CS instructions which may have implications for interventions aimed at reducing negative group attitudes.

Implicit Evaluation Mechanisms in Marketing Research: an Overview of Formation and Measurement of Implicit Attitude

For a long time, examining the subtle and unintended effects of people's social environments on their thoughts and behaviors has been a central goal of social psychology researchers. Advances in social psychology have proven the importance of studying not only the conscious mechanisms of humans but also the "implicit" and "automatic" ones. Researchers in social psychology distinguish explicit attitudes, evaluations resulting from an introspective effort, from implicit attitudes, automatic evaluations of which the individual may not be aware. Cognitive psychology researchers have already proven that implicit beliefs are much more important in decision-making than explicit beliefs even in what might be considered rational and/or scientific realms. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) introduced the term implicit social cognition to describe cognitive processes that occur outside of human consciousness. Implicit social cognitions were initially applied to psychology, but they are beginning to be introduced in other disciplines, notably in marketing. This article aims to provide a conceptual framework of the implicit attitude and its measurement tools through a multidisciplinary theoretical exploration. Therefore, the research method used in this paper is the analysis of the classic literature. This paper summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the issue of implicit mechanisms in the marketing field. This review theoretically proves that the study of implicit social cognitions is a field of research with many challenges, particularly related to consumer behavior analysis because it allows marketers to understand influences unknown to the subject himself.

‘A radical operation’ – a thematic analysis of newspaper framing of bariatric surgery in adolescents

BackgroundObesity in adolescents is a growing public health issue. Bariatric surgery is an effective, yet controversial treatment option for adolescents. The moral acceptability of this procedure by health-care professionals as well as the general public can be influenced by its portrayal in the news media. Our objective was to analyze how newspaper articles portrayed adolescent bariatric surgery, with attention to the language used and moral arguments made.MethodsUsing an inductive thematic analysis approach, we analyzed 26 UK and 12 US newspaper articles (2014–2022) on adolescent bariatric surgery for implicit or explicit moral evaluations and use of normative language. Coding was performed after immersive reading, assisted by NVivo. Themes were identified and refined iteratively through consecutive auditing cycles to enrich the depth and rigor of our analysis.ResultsThe major themes identified related to (1) defining the burden of adolescent obesity, (2) sparking moral outrage, (3) sensation-seeking, and (4) raising ethical issues. The articles employed moral language, specifically non-neutral and negative discourse regarding surgery. Blame was attributed to adolescents or their parents. Sensationalist wording often reinforced the normative content, drawing the attention of the reader and contributing to stigmatization of adolescents with severe obesity as lacking will power and being lazy. Further moral issues that stood out were the challenges in obtaining an informed consent, and the unequal access to surgery for socially disadvantaged groups.ConclusionsOur findings provide insights into how adolescent bariatric surgery is represented in the print news media. Despite frequent citing of experts and studies on the efficacy, safety and unmet need for bariatric surgery, obesity and surgery in adolescents are often stigmatized and sensationalized, with (prospective) patients depicted as looking for an easy way out in the form of a solution brought by others (health systems, society, tax payers). This may increase the stigma surrounding adolescent obesity, and therefore limit the acceptability of specific treatments such as bariatric surgery.

LANGUAGE MEANS OF EXPRESSING IMPLICIT EVALUATION IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCOURSE: PRAGMATIC ASPECT

This article deals with role of politics and politicians in modern world, the linguistic tendencies of study of contemporary political discourse and the category of evaluation in general, and language means of expressing implicit evaluation in particular, which is considered to be a semantic and pragmatic category and one of the most powerful means of influence on the audience. The pragmatic aim of contemporary political discourse texts lays in the interpretation of event, conveying a variety of indirect or direct, supportive or opposing evaluating attitudes toward it. This study focuses on different evaluative language means used by politicians in their political speeches on different occasions within the appraisal theory framework, under which in this paper we understand a variety of meaning-making language means used by the speakers to express their evaluative involvement in communication.

Attribution Impacts Implicit (And Explicit) Evaluations

Two studies examined whether the attributional framing of negative events affected explicit evaluations, as measured by differences in liking, and implicit evaluations, as measured by the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998). In Study 1, participants read negative information about a novel target ordered to elicit internal or external attributions. Participants in the internal attribution condition evaluated the target more negatively than did those in the external attribution condition on both implicit and explicit measures. Study 2 replicated these results and tested the effects of attribution on recently formed negative evaluations. Participants who evaluated targets before and after receiving additional negative information about them demonstrated implicit and explicit evaluative change consistent with the attributional framing of that information. This research provides clear evidence that attribution influences the formation and change of implicit evaluations; however, these effects were weaker than those on explicit measures of evaluation.

Имплицитные способы выражения оценки и авторского начала в медиатекстах о культуре

Our research focuses on identifying implicit ways of expressing evaluation and identifying the role of the author in media texts about culture. In order to analyze the category of evaluation we took Russian-language and German-language articles, which have a common newsworthy occurrence: the 130th anniversary of the birth of Marina Tsvetaeva. In the course of the study the publications were analyzed in terms of the presence of implicit evaluations and the linguistic means by which they are carried out. As a result of the study, it turned out that the evaluation has a predominantly positive character on the part of both Russian and German-speaking publications. The implicit evaluation of the Russian-language media texts was expressed at the level of grammar, while the German-language media texts used metaphors and epithets. We also analyzed publications for the presence of the author in the media text according to two parameters proposed by T. V. Shmeleva: author identification and the degree of media text complexity.

A METHOD OF AUTOMATED GENERATION OF RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATION APPLICANTS BASED ON A HYBRID APPROACH

The most popular areas of use of recommender systems are platforms containing movies, music, books, and other objects that are fairly similar in their characteristics. Quite a lot of both general and specific methods of building recommendations have been developed for such systems. The article discusses the method of automated generation of recommendations for education applicants based on a hybrid approach, which involves taking into account the content of the objects of interest of the student. An analysis of the existing approaches to the construction of the recommendation was carried out and key problems were identified. It was determined that taking into account the content of objects of interest and users allows to increase the accuracy of the recommendation. The article provides typical types of recommendations that students need in the educational process. Sources for the formation of recommendations are described, in particular, explicit evaluations of objects of interest obtained on the basis of mandatory student surveys; implicit evaluations obtained on the basis of analysis of the behavior of users in the system and the content of objects of interest and users. The characteristics of the objects of interest were studied and it was determined that they necessarily have short or long text descriptions. The key stages of the method of automated formation of the recommendation are determined, taking into account the specifics of the domain of the subject area. In order to increase the accuracy of the recommendations, it is proposed to perform a preliminary selection of potentially interesting objects for the user based on Natural Language Processing methods before applying collaborative filtering. This will allow taking into account, among other things, the semantic proximity of the user's interests and objects in the system even with small amounts of textual information about objects of interest and users. In addition, the accuracy of the recommendation can be increased due to the use of explicit assessments of objects of interest, which are obtained at the level of the educational institution by regular measures to monitor the quality of education.

The interactive relationship between implicit cognition and goal pursuit

The traditional view of goal is that goals are set and pursued in a deliberate and controlled way, yet in the last two decades, researchers have focused on the implicit cognitive process involved in personal goal pursuit. This article presents contemporary work on this topic and shows a holistic picture of the relationship between implicit cognition and goal pursuit. Research shows that implicit cognition plays a critical role in the process of goal pursuit including the initial activation, the action during, and the eventual outcome. The manner in which implicit cognition influences goal pursuit is interactive and creates either a positive or negative feedback loop. Factors include the implicit need of achievements, implicit evaluation of goal-relevant experience and implicit thoughts promoted by the goal all contribute to the feedback loop. Certain components of implicit cognition are also predictive of goal attainment, such as the implicit importance of means towards achievement. The enriched existing data and findings on the topic offer valuable insights and lay a solid foundation for future research.

Intersectional implicit bias: Evidence for asymmetrically compounding bias and the predominance of target gender.

Little is known about implicit evaluations of complex, multiply categorizable social targets. Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consistent pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class biases. By contrast, we observed less consistent effects of targets' race, no effects of targets' age, and no consistent interactions between target-level categories. An integrative data analysis highlighted a number of moderating factors, but a stable pro-women/anti-men and pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class bias across demographic groups. Overall, these results suggest that implicit biases compound across multiple categories asymmetrically, with a dominant category (here, gender) largely driving evaluations, and ancillary categories (here, social class and race) exerting relatively smaller additional effects. We discuss potential implications of this work for understanding how implicit biases operate in real-world social settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Relation Between Updated Implicit Evaluations and the Trust Game

Recent work has shown that people can update their implicit evaluations based on facial trustworthiness. However, do these updated implicit evaluations map onto subsequent decisions? We examined whether implicit evaluations based on faces but updated in light of new behavioral evidence uniquely predict responses in the trust game. Across six studies (N = 2,059), we measured participants’ initial implicit evaluations of a target based on the target’s face and then their updated implicit evaluations based on newly learned behavioral evidence. We then tested whether these updated implicit evaluations uniquely predicted (i.e., beyond explicit evaluations) responses in a hypothetical trust game. Although participants consistently based their initial evaluations on the face and updated their evaluations after learning new diagnostic information, their updated implicit evaluations did not uniquely predict their responses in the trust game. We discuss theoretical considerations in this article.

Research on the Neural Mechanism of Subconscious Evaluation of Mobile Interfaces in Smart Apps

Following the development of mobile internet and smart devices, designing smart product interfaces is positively significant to enhance user experience and improving the quality of life. Users automatically produce implicit evaluations when they encounter or use the interfaces of smart devices. However, what happens in our brain after receiving the visual information? How do we process visual information? How do the interface design features affect the subconscious evaluation process? To answer these questions, the current study aims to investigate the neural mechanism of users’ subconscious evaluation process of mobile interfaces in smart apps by using event-related potentials (ERPs) technology. ERPs results showed that P1, N1, and N2 can reflect participants’ subconscious evaluation of mobile interfaces in smart apps. In conclusion, participants could evaluate the more obvious layout feature but ignore the less obvious color feature of mobile news app interfaces automatically. Moreover, both the right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses were observed in the current study. These findings enrich the design of mobile interfaces and user cognition theory. Besides, the present study established a feasible technological method for the acquisition of users’ implicit needs and provides a data foundation for smart service. In addition, it can help app designers to identify users’ implicit needs and compare the alternative prototype in the development stage of mobile interfaces.

Attenuating experimentally acquired disgust: Comparing counterconditioning, exposure and unconditioned stimulus revaluation

Background and objectivesDisgust is implicated in the aetiology and maintenance of various psychopathologies such as anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Despite its prominent role in psychopathology, little is known about how to effectively attenuate disgust. The study examined strategies to modify an experimentally acquired disgust response in a sample of undergraduate students. MethodsA conditioning paradigm was used where participants (N = 175) first underwent acquisition of disgust via repeated presentations of a neutral picture (functioning as conditioned stimulus + [CS+]) paired with a disgusting picture (functioning as unconditioned stimulus [US]). Participants were then randomly assigned to either an exposure (repeated presentation of CS-only trials), counterconditioning (pairing CS+ with pleasant pictures), US revaluation (pairing disgusting US with pleasant pictures) or a control (filler task) condition. We hypothesised that counterconditioning would attenuate evaluative learned disgust to the greatest extent, relative to exposure and US revaluation. Participants’ evaluations of the pictures were attained with a disgust-pleasantness visual analogue scale. ResultsExposure, counterconditioning and US revaluation reduced disgusting US expectancies. However, experimental and control conditions did not differ in terms of attenuating disgust towards CS+. LimitationsMeasures of psychopathology and implicit evaluations of disgust were not collected. Modest power might have limited significance of the results. ConclusionsNo statistical support for the effectiveness of disgust attenuation following exposure nor counterconditioning were found. Findings for US revaluation are inconclusive. Implications for future research are discussed.

Adaptation and Validation of Dynamic Career Scale (DCS) in Serbian context

Background Dynamic Career Scale (DSC) is originally developed and validated in order to enable evaluation of implicit and less conscious dynamics in career adjustment processes. The objective of the current study was to translate, culturally adapt and psychometrically validate the DCS in Serbian population. Methods The instrument is theoretically grounded in psychodynamic conception of the career adjustment and measures four modes of functioning in facing career failures and challenges: true reparation, manic reparation, mania and envy. Using a cross-sectional design and multiphase sampling procedure, data were obtained from 514 respondents. Results Exploratory factor analysis using half of the sample supported the four-factor model with factors reflecting dimensions established in the original version of the instrument (60.29% of the variance explained). The measurement model was confirmed using confirmatory factor analysis with the other part of the sample (CFI = .930; RMSEA = .056; SRMR = .065). Conclusion The findings provide evidence that the four-factor structure of the DCS previously established in the Italian sample is also evident in the Serbian population, confirming the cross-cultural replicability.