Positive Affective Priming Research Articles

Affective evaluation of consciously perceived emotional faces reveals a "correct attribution effect".

The strength of the affective priming effect is influenced by various factors, including the duration of the prime. Surprisingly, short-duration primes that are around the threshold for conscious awareness typically result in stronger effects compared to long-duration primes. The misattribution effect theory suggest that subliminal primes do not provide sufficient cognitive processing time for the affective feeling to be attributed to the prime. Instead, the neutral target being evaluated is credited for the affective experience. In everyday social interactions, we shift our gaze from one face to another, typically contemplating each face for only a few seconds. It is reasonable to assume that no affective priming takes place during such interactions. To investigate whether this is indeed the case, participants were asked to rate the valence of faces displayed one by one. Each face image simultaneously served as both a target (primed by the previous trial) and a prime (for the next trial). Depending on the participant's response time, images were typically displayed for about 1-2 s. As predicted by the misattribution effect theory, neutral targets were not affected by positive affective priming. However, non-neutral targets showed a robust priming effect, with emotional faces being perceived as even more negative or positive when the previously seen face was emotionally congruent. These results suggest that a "correct attribution effect" modulates how we perceive faces, continuously impacting our social interactions. Given the importance of faces in social communication, these findings have wide-ranging implications.

Priming social media and framing cause-related marketing to promote sustainable hotel choice

Hotels utilize cause-related marketing (CRM) to attract consumers by advertising green practices. However, CRM does not always result in the intended outcomes. In online settings, customer-generated cues transmitted through social media can influence responses to company-generated CRM. Two psychological processes can operate to influence the effect of online cues on decision processes: priming and framing. The current research used an online survey in which priming and framing were varied in a simulated hotel-booking scenario. Affective priming was activated using an Instagram post with positive or negative environmental content. CRM framing consisted of a hotel advertisement describing its sustainability practices as producing environmental benefit or preventing environmental harm. Structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed that positive affective priming and positively framed CRM advertising produce a favorable hotel image, which in turn leads to higher booking intention. Moreover, pro-environmental attitudes magnify the effects of image on multiple outcomes, including booking intention, willingness-to-pay more, and word-of-mouth. The findings will help operators develop effective marketing strategies and leverage social media to promote their business while protecting the environment.

Effect of Affective Priming on Prosocial Orientation through Mobile Application: Differences between Digital Immigrants and Natives

Digital revolution has drastically changed people’s lives in the last three decades inspiring scholars to deepen the role of technologies in thinking and information processing (Baranyi et al., 2015). Prensky (2001) has developed the notion of digital generation, differentiating between natives and immigrants. Digital natives are characterised by their highly automatic and quick response in hyper-textual environment. Digital immigrants are characterised by their main focus on textual elements and a greater proneness to reflection. The main goal of the present research is to investigate the effect of affective priming on prosocial orientation in natives and immigrants by using a mobile application. A quasi-experimental study has been conducted to test whether and how the manipulation of the priming, through positively and negatively connoted images, influences prosocial orientation. The results attested that negative affective priming elicited by app influences negatively prosocial orientation, while positive affective priming influences it positively prosocial orientation. However, this effect is true mainly for digital natives. Overall, findings underline the relevance of taking into account the effects of affective priming in technological environment, especially in the case of digital natives.

Positive affective priming decreases the middle late positive potential response to negative images.

IntroductionThis study aims to expand on previous literature showing that incidental emotion state priming in a specific domain leads to a higher probability that the primed emotion domain will be activated during a subsequent task.MethodsTo that end, we investigated the influence of happy, fearful, and neutral incidental emotion state priming on subsequent responses to emotionally negative and neutral pictures, measured by the event‐related potential (ERP) late positive potential (LPP). New to our study, we examined the influence of affective priming on the LPP response (analyzed separately at early and middle latency ranges) to emotional pictures in both the foveal and extrafoveal presentation locations.ResultsFollowing both fearful and neutral incidental state priming, both the early and middle LPP latency ranges overwhelmingly differentiated between negative and neutral pictures. Following happy incidental state priming, however, the LPP response failed to differentiate between negative and neutral pictures by the middle LPP latency range (800–1,000 ms). These results suggest that incidental happy states can have a protective effect when viewing aversive stimuli. Additionally, the LPP showed greater sensitivity to negative stimuli when presented extrafoveally compared to foveally.ConclusionsOverall, our findings suggest that incidental affective state and stimulus location influence emotional processing differentially for emotionally negative and emotionally neutral stimuli.

Individual Differences in Affective Priming Effects: Any Links with Personality and Trait Affectivity?

Processing tendencies refer to individual differences in the automatic processing of affective stimuli. Using the affective priming paradigm one can tap these processing tendencies and differentiate positive and negative affective priming scores. In this study we used a classical evaluative decision task with nouns as primes and adjectives as targets to assess individual differences in positive and negative affective priming in two time points. Using Steyer’s (Steyer et al. in Methods of Psychological Research Online 2(1), 21–33, 1997) true intraindividual change modeling approach, the positive and negative priming scores were defined on a latent level. No significant relationships were found between positive affective priming and trait positive affect nor extraversion, as well as between negative affective priming and trait negative affect and neuroticism. As these findings are not in line with previous research (Robinson et al. in Emotion 10(5), 615–626, 2010; Robinson et al. in Personality and Individual Differences 42(7), 1221–1231, 2007) possible moderating influences are discussed.

The Influence of Affective Priming on One's Perceived Relationship to God

It seems that when individuals are asked to assess their perceived relationship to God, they are often given a negative affective prime prior to the assessment. The purpose of the current series of studies was to explore how this negative affective priming would influence participants’ thoughts about their perceived relationship to God. Study 1 showed that the classic priming effect can be seen when the affective priming is nonreligious. However, going against predictions, there was a contrast effect when there was a religious focus with the positive priming having the most negative influence. Study 2 replicated and expanded this finding by showing that positive affective priming was linked to participants reporting that they experienced God's love less frequently. The current study highlights how the way that individuals think about or approach their relationship to God can have serious effects on how they experience this relationship.

Positive Affective Priming: A Behavioral Technique to Facilitate Therapeutic Engagement by Families, Caregivers, and Teachers

Affective priming is a technique used in experimental psychology to investigate the organization of emotional schemata not fully available to conscious awareness. The presentation of stimuli (the prime) with strong positive emotional valence alters the accessibility of positive stimuli within the individual's emotionally encoded cognitive system. By altering the valence of internal stimuli, it offers a method for influencing families, caregivers, and teachers serving as mediators in child behavior therapy. The need for priming is greatest where adults involved in therapy as agents of child behavior change have such negative feelings toward the targeted client, or to the therapeutic context, that acceptance and engagement with therapy are compromised. Examples of how positive affective priming might be used clinically are provided.

Extraversion and reward-related processing: Probing incentive motivation in affective priming tasks.

Based on an incentive motivation theory of extraversion (Depue & Collins, 1999), it was hypothesized that extraverts (relative to introverts) would exhibit stronger positive priming effects in affective priming tasks, whether involving words or pictures. This hypothesis was systematically supported in four studies involving 229 undergraduates. In each of the four studies, and in a subsequent combined analysis, extraversion was positively predictive of positive affective priming effects, but was not predictive of negative affective priming effects. The results bridge an important gap in the literature between biological and trait models of incentive motivation and do so in a way that should be informative to subsequent efforts to understand the processing basis of extraversion as well as incentive motivation.

Encouraging the perceptual underdog: Positive affective priming of nonpreferred local–global processes.

Two experiments examined affective priming of global and local perception. Participants attempted to detect a target that might be present as either a global or a local shape. Verbal primes were used in 1 experiment, and pictorial primes were used in the other. In both experiments, positive primes led to improved performance on the nonpreferred dimension. For participants exhibiting global precedence, detection of local targets was significantly improved, whereas for participants exhibiting local precedence, detection of global targets was significantly improved. The results provide support for an interpretation of the effects of positive affective priming in terms of increased perceptual flexibility.

Neuroticism and affective priming: Evidence for a neuroticism-linked negative schema

Neuroticism has been hypothesized to systematically relate to semantic memory networks favoring negative affect, but no studies using affective priming tasks have established this link. The present two studies, involving 145 undergraduate participants, sought to provide initial evidence along these lines. Study 1 used a task in which participants were asked to judge their emotions in the past, whereas Study 2 used a perceptual identification task in which participants merely had to identify the word in question. In both studies, neuroticism was positively correlated with negative affective priming, but not positive affective priming. The studies suggest that neuroticism systematically relates to the inter-connectivity of negative affect within semantic memory systems, whether involving the self-concept (Study 1) or not (Study 2). These results are novel and important in understanding individual differences in neuroticism and their affective processing correlates.

The direction of affective priming as a function of trait anxiety when naming target words with regular and irregular pronunciation.

Results from an affective priming experiment confirm the previously reported influence of trait anxiety on the direction of affective priming in the naming task (Maier, Berner, & Pekrun, 2003): On trials in which extremely valenced primes appeared, positive affective priming reversed into negative affective priming with increasing levels of trait anxiety. Using valenced target words with irregular pronunciation did not have the expected effect of increasing the extent to which semantic processes play a role in naming, as affective priming effects were not stronger for irregular targets than for regular targets. This suggests the predominant operation of a whole-word nonsemantic pathway in reading aloud in German. Data from neutral priming trials hint at the possibility that negative affective priming in participants high in trait anxiety is due to inhibition of congruent targets.

Affective Priming Effects in the Left and Right Cerebral Hemispheres in Patients With Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients and control subjects were tested in an affective priming paradigm associated with an affective discrimination task. Two pictures, one affectively positive or affectively negative and the other neutral, were presented simultaneously in the right and in the left visual fields; the participants had to decide which of the two pictures was the most affectively positive or negative. The target pictures were preceded by a prime picture that was either affectively positive, affectively negative, or neutral. The principal result was the observation, in AD patients as well as in control subjects, of negative affective priming effects for targets presented in the right hemisphere, and of positive affective priming effects for targets presented in the left hemisphere. The presence of affective priming effects suggests that AD patients have no particular deficit in the automatic activation of emotional information; the fact that priming effects were also observed for targets presented in the left hemisphere showed that AD patients probably have no left hemisphere deficit in the automatic activation of emotional information. However, in AD patients, affective priming effects were significant with negative targets but not with positive targets, which could suggest that AD patients processed positive targets in a more semantic way than negative targets.