Priming Thoughts Research Articles

(Eye-)tracking the escape from the self: guilt proneness moderates the effect of failure on self-avoidance

ABSTRACT Failure increases the motivation to escape self-awareness. To date, however, the role of self-conscious emotions (shame and guilt) in triggering escape responses after failure has not been sufficiently addressed. In this pre-registered study (N = 156 undergraduates), we adapted a classic paradigm (avoidance of one’s image in a mirror) to a modern eye-tracking technology to test the hypothesis that shame proneness moderates the effect of failure on self-awareness avoidance. Individual differences in guilt and shame proneness were assessed before priming thoughts of failure or success. Then, an eye-tracking paradigm was used to monitor gaze avoidance of one’s screen-reflected face during a neutral, unrelated task. Unexpectedly, results showed that guilt but not shame proneness exacerbated self-avoidance after failure. The present findings challenge the dominant view that shame fosters avoidance more so than guilt.

The Impact of Social Endorsement Cues and Manipulability Concerns on Perceptions of News Credibility.

Social endorsement cues (SEC) offer information about how online users have engaged and evaluated online content. Some view that SEC thus can serve as useful heuristics when users evaluate the credibility of news content on social media. At the same time, SEC can be manipulated by a variety of commercial and political actors on social media. This study examines whether SEC influence individuals' credibility judgments of political news on social media, and how the salience of concerns that SEC can be manipulated by others can undermine the perceived credibility. Using an experiment, we found that SEC had a negative influence on news credibility, regardless of whether or not SEC manipulability concerns were primed. An independent effect of SEC manipulability concerns was also found, such that priming thoughts about the manipulability of SEC led participants to rate the news post as less credible, regardless of whether that post included SEC. These results suggest a spillover effect whereby concerns over the manipulation of SEC can create doubt about the authenticity of other cues from the news (e.g., source and message), and lead to perceptions that news shared on social media can be manipulated more generally.

Effects of Elaborated Likelihood Model and Attitudinal Change Toward the Investments

On the spectrum of the persuasion from the basis of Elaborated Likelihood Model (ELM) and Cognitive Dissonance Theory, this paper discusses how persuasion accounts for effects of attitudinal change underlying the elaboration likelihood model. Along with the previous emphasis on the central route and peripheral route as the factors on analysis of persuasion, we hypothesize that one of these routes will affect the result of persuasion. Specifically, we predicted that the participants will be highly persuaded when they are given the central route argument rather than the peripheral route. Participants (n = 344)-mostly non-college students- were randomly selected to participate in an online survey through Mechanical Turk consisting of prompts and questions about the types of investments. The survey contained questions about interest and opinion in the type of investment, using a 9-point Likert scale. The results revealed a significant main effect of interest in bitcoin and gold that showed more preference toward gold, but no signi cant main effect and interaction of peripheral route and central route on interest in the type of investments. Central and peripheral did not significantly differ in their interest of investment types (p = .01). However, gold was significantly more interesting as an investment when compared to bitcoin (p = .95). Our findings suggest that types of persuasion may not matter in trying to persuade people from investing in bitcoin or gold. This might be due to the priming thoughts about the currency and interest. This suggests that such logic required variable, investment, may alter one’s attitude toward investment based on their previous experiences and beliefs playing an important role in their interest in the investment regardless of persuasion route.

Priming Thoughts of Failing Versus Succeeding and Performance on the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) as a Measure of Self-Forgiveness

Purpose This study aimed to test the effect of positive and negative priming on the assessment of self-forgiveness in the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) related to emotional reactions and expected outcomes in everyday life. Additionally, the research explored the extent to which such implicit reactions were related to standardized measures of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, stress, and a scale that was based directly on the IRAP.

Smoke Your Troubles Away: Exploring the Effects of Death Cognitions on Cannabis Craving and Consumption

Two studies informed by the terror management health model were conducted to examine the question of how death cognition affects cannabis craving and whether actual cannabis smoking alleviates death cognitions. The first study examined whether priming thoughts of death are associated with subjective cannabis craving among 42 frequent cannabis users randomly assigned to either a mortality salience or control task. When reminded of their death, participants craved cannabis, even though there was no change in their conscious negative mood. The second study examined the effect of cannabis smoking on death cognitions in an exploratory field setting. Fifty frequent cannabis users were randomly assigned to either mortality reminders or control task and completed death-related words accessibility measures before and after smoking cannabis. Results indicate that cannabis served as a buffer and prevented death-related thoughts from entering consciousness, thus acting as a defense mechanism against death anxiety. These findings indicate that death-related concerns may play a hitherto unsuspected role in cannabis craving and consumption. Also discussed are the implications of a terror management perspective in communication of negative health consequences of recreational cannabis smoking and in the use of cannabis for medical purposes among people with terminal illness.

Desire to work as a death anxiety buffer mechanism.

Four studies were conducted to examine the death anxiety buffering function of work as a terror management mechanism, and the possible moderating role of culture. In Study 1, making mortality salient led to higher reports of participants' desire to work. In Study 2, activating thoughts of fulfillment of the desire to work after mortality salience reduced the accessibility of death-related thoughts. In Study 3, activating thoughts of fulfillment of the desire to work reduced the effects of mortality salience on out-group derogation. In Study 4, priming thoughts about obstacles to the actualization of desire to work led to greater accessibility of death-related thoughts. Although two different cultures with contrasting work values were examined, the results were consistent, indicating that the desire to work serves as a death anxiety buffer mechanism in both cultures.

Implicit death primes increase alcohol consumption.

The authors examined whether priming thoughts of death are associated with increases in alcohol consumption. Research assistants handed out fliers that were stacked in a random order to pedestrians walking through campus (N = 377). These fliers served to remind them of either their death or of an aversive condition unrelated to death (severe back pain), which served as the control. Then they were solicited to purchase an alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverage. The authors used a 2 × 2 log-linear analysis, with type of prime (death-pain) and beverage type (alcoholic-nonalcoholic) as the independent variables and consumption (yes-no) as the outcome measure (11.9% of the total sample consumed a beverage). RESULTS revealed that a greater percentage of students who received the death prime consumed alcohol (36.59%) versus students in the pain prime condition (8.94%), G²(4, N = 377) = 64.8, p < .001, W = .41. The type of prime (death-pain) did not influence the consumption of nonalcoholic beverages. The current research indicates that death-related concerns may play a role in increasing the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

Priming thoughts about extravagance: Implications for consumer decisions about luxury products.

If a semantic concept is accessible in memory, it can direct attention to the attributes of a target that exemplify this concept. When these attributes have both affective and utilitarian implications that are evaluatively opposite, the relative impact of these different implications depends on an individual's ability and motivation to expend the cognitive effort required to evaluate them. These assumptions were confirmed in six experiments on the impact of priming the concept of extravagance on attention to a product's luxury-related features and consequent reactions to it. Priming this concept decreased the choice of a luxury product if participants were both motivated and able to construe the utilitarian implications of the product's extravagance-related features. When participants were either distracted from deliberating on their choices or were asked to recommend a product to others, however, priming extravagance led them to base their judgments on the affective reactions that the features spontaneously elicited and consequently increased their choice of the product.

Do I smell pot? A trial of an alternative paradigm of olfactory cue-reactance to marijuana

Marijuana, the most commonly used illicit drug among college students, remains the most cited reason for entering treatment for substance abuse and dependency (Johnston, L.D., O’Malley, P.M., Bachman, J.G., & Schulenberg, J.E. (2009). Monitoring the future: National survey results on drug use, 1975–2008. Volume II: College students and adults aged 19–50. Bethesda, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse). Current models now include craving as a potential indicator of drug problems (Goldstein, R.Z., & Volkow, N.D. (2002). Drug addiction and its underlying neurobiological basis: Neuroimaging evidence for the involvement of the frontal cortex. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 1642–1652). Memory-expectancy and cue-reactance manipulations are increasingly common in the study of craving. Such manipulations rely on the use of relevant cues to prime thoughts associated with the substance of interest. Nevertheless, manipulations involving marijuana primes remain limited; most only using visual and over-stereotyped cues and are tested using samples that already meet criteria for problematic use. The current experiment tested an olfactory manipulation for priming thoughts of marijuana using a sample of 85 college students that represent an array of past marijuana use. Two 2 × 3 χ2 tests revealed that participants who smelled cannabis reported a higher proportion of primed words associated with marijuana than those who smelled a control scent. Logistic regression revealed that history of cannabis use did not alter the magnitude of this priming effect. Results support the use of this study's novel olfactory cue as an appropriate manipulation for the study of marijuana priming effects within college-aged samples.

Examining the Terror Management Health Model: The Interactive Effect of Conscious Death Thought and Health-Coping Variables on Decisions in Potentially Fatal Health Domains

From the perspective of the terror management health model (TMHM), expectancies as to whether a health behavior is likely to effectively protect one's health (i.e., response efficacy) and whether an individual is optimistic about the outcomes of his or her health risk assessment (i.e., health optimism) should have a more potent influence on health decisions when thoughts of death are conscious and the health risk domain is potentially fatal. Supporting this, health optimism and response efficacy were found to moderate skin cancer prevention intentions in response to conscious, but not nonconscious, reminders of death,whereas this same relationship was not found in the context of priming thoughts associated with uncertainty. Moreover, these effects were not observed in response to nonfatal dental care outcomes. Discussion focuses on the implications of TMHM for existing health models and health promotion.

Integrating psychometric and cultural theory approaches to formulate an alternative measure of risk perception

Psychometric and cultural theory are key approaches used to explain risk perceptions. However, both approaches explain only 20 and 5–10% of the variance of risk perceptions, respectively. Through advances in social psychology, terror management theory revealed that certain survey questions used in the psychometric approach primed thoughts of death. Such unintentional priming evoked defense mechanisms that would subconsciously activate participants’ cultural biases and values when answering some questions but not others. There are two implications: one, psychometric theorists need to modify their questionnaires to reduce the incidence of priming thoughts of death; and two, integrating the psychometric and cultural theory approaches may potentially explain a higher amount of variance in risk perceptions. Specifically, attitudes (psychometric approach), demographics, affect and past behavior collectively influence cultural biases, which in turn exert an effect on risk perception. However, such a model calls for an appropriate measure of the dynamic nature of cultural biases that current attitudinal measures fall short of. Drawing from methodology within industrial/organizational psychology, the Situational Judgment Test (SJT) is proposed as an alternative measure for risk perception. Steps to designing an SJT are outlined and followed through to culminate in a 10-item SJT that measures cultural biases.

Media Use and Public Perceptions of DNA Evidence

This study uses survey data to examine how various forms of media use are related to public perceptions of DNA evidence, including self-perceived understanding of DNA, perceptions of DNA evidence as reliable, weight attached to DNA evidence (or the absence thereof) in jury decision making, and support for a national DNA databank.The hypotheses build on cultivation theory, priming theory, and research regarding the “ CSI effect.” The findings indicate that overall television viewing, crime television viewing, and news media use predict perceptions of DNA evidence. Moreover, a question-order experiment produced evidence that priming thoughts about media can influence such perceptions.

Attitudes toward Animals: The Effect of Priming Thoughts of Human-Animal Similarities and Mortality Salience on the Evaluation of Companion Animals

AbstractHuman attitudes toward nonhuman animals are complex and quite contradictory. They can range between extremely negative (animal cruelty) to positive (treating companion animals like human surrogates). Attitudes toward animals are especially negative when people think about human creatureliness and personal mortality. This paper investigates people's attitudes toward highly valued animals (companion animals). The research presented here tested whether companion-animal caregivers would respond to reminders of human creatureliness and mortality salience (MS) with more negative attitudes toward pets. Participants completed an online survey in which MS and human-creatureliness conditions were manipulated. Results showed that, under MS, even pet owners responded to reminders of human creatureliness with less positive attitudes toward the average pet. Thus, the effects observed in previous research extend to more popular animals, even among people with presumably positive attitudes toward animals.

Ambivalence Toward the Body: Death, Neuroticism, and the Flight From Physical Sensation

Based on terror management theory, the authors suggest that ambivalent reactions to the human body are partially rooted in the association of the physical body with inescapable death and that individuals high in neuroticism are particularly vulnerable to such difficulties. Three experiments demonstrated that priming thoughts about one's death leads individuals high in neuroticism to flee from physical sensations, including pleasurable ones. In response to mortality salience, highly neurotic individuals spent less time submerging their arm in ice-cold water and using an electric foot massager but did not avoid stimulation in nontactile modalities (i.e., listening to music). The discussion highlights the role of existentially motivated self-repression in inhibitions surrounding the body.

Effects of priming thoughts about control on anxiety and food intake as moderated by dietary restraint

The study was designed to examine: (a) if activating thoughts about control affects anxiety and food intake and (b) if those effects are moderated by dietary restraint. Eighty female undergraduates were administered the Dietary Restraint questionnaire and were primed for cognitions of control or of lack of control. The participants' perceptions of control over food consumption, their state anxiety, and their food intake as part of an alleged taste-test, were assessed. As evidence for the effectiveness of priming, participants reported less control over food consumption after being primed for lack of control than for control cognitions. As expected, Restraint score was negatively correlated with perceived control over food consumption. Consistent with hypothesis, participants high in dietary restraint experienced greater anxiety after being primed for control than after priming for lack of control, whereas participants low in dietary restraint displayed the opposite pattern. These findings were consistent with the cognitive dissonance principle that individuals experience greater anxiety when cognitions are inconsistent with personal beliefs than when they are consistent. As expected, priming thoughts of lack of control resulted in greater food intake than did priming thoughts of control, supporting the hypothesis of a nonconscious, automatic link between cognitions and food intake.

African American men as “criminal and dangerous”: Implications of media portrayals of crime on the “criminalization” of African American men

Tragic police shootings of innocent individuals assumed to be dangerous or criminal happen at an alarming rate, with several notable instances occurring in the last several years (Dvorak, 2001; Kelly, 2000; Staples, 2000). Why might an individual be mistakenly "assumed" to be threatening or violent? Naturally, a host of variables may play contributory roles in priming thoughts of danger or aggression, including age, dress, and gender, among others. Nevertheless, the frequency with which black men specifically have been the target of mistakenly placed police aggression speaks to the undeniable role that race plays in false assumptions of danger and criminality. Of course, the mistaken identification of individuals as potentially violent or dangerous is a phenomenon that is not isolated to law-enforcement circumstances. In contrast, this sort of situation is manifest in a variety of settings, including store clerks who keep a particularly keen eye on African American male customers who are targeted as potential shoplifters, and white women who clutch their pocketbooks more closely when in the presence of black men. Brent Staples, an African American writer for the New York Times, recalled his experiences with being the target of fear and mistrust when he was a graduate

Understanding human ambivalence about sex: The effects of stripping sex of meaning

We offer a theoretical perspective to provide insight into why people are ambivalent about sex and why cultures regulate sex and attach symbolic meaning to it. Building on terror management theory, we propose that sex is problematic for humankind in part because it reminds us of our creaturely mortal nature. Two experiments investigated the effects of reminding people of the similarity between humans and other animals on their reactions to the physical aspects of sex. In Study 1, priming human‐animal similarities led to increased accessibility of death‐related thoughts after thinking about the physical but not romantic aspects of sex. In Study 2, when participants were reminded of similarities between humans and other animals, mortality salience resulted in decreased attraction to the physical but not romantic aspects of sex. In each study, priming thoughts about how humans are distinct from animals eliminated the association between sex and death.