The affective priming effect: Automatic activation of evaluative information in memory

Abstract

Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986) argued that affect may be activated automatically from memory on the mere observation of an affect-loaded stimulus. Using a variant of the standard sequential priming paradigm, it was demonstrated that the time needed to evaluate target words as positive or negative decreased if they were preceded by a similarly valenced prime word, but increased when preceded by a prime of opposite valence. Several aspects of their procedure, however, do not warrant their conclusion concerning the unconditionality of the effect. The present research investigated the generality of this affective priming effect. In Experiment 1, it was tested whether the effect can be generalised to more complex visual material. Stimulus pairs consisted of colour slides. Subjects had to evaluate the targets as quickly as possible. In Experiment 2, the standard word-word procedure was used, but target words had to be pronounced. In both experiments, significant affective priming effects were observed, supporting Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, and Pratto's (1992) assertion that the automatic activation effect is a pervasive and relative unconditional phenomenon. Implications for theories of affect and emotion are discussed.     

Systemische Familien- und Spieltherapie im Krankenhaus

Studies on children after pediatric liver transplantation have shown that patients are confronted with various psychosocial problems due to the illness and long hospitalization. They do not have suitable coping strategies available to handle this situation. A concept of systemic family therapy and play therapy for children in hospital was thus developed. The patients and their families are accompanied during hospitalization, are supported preventively and are helped in developing suitable strategies for coping with the psychosocial stress.     

Launching the effect: Representations of causal movements are influenced by what they lead to

We investigated whether the representation of an observed causal movement is influenced by its observed effect. Subjects watched displays showing collisions between two objects. In this 'launching event' (Michotte, 1946/1963), one of the two objects (Object A) started to move and set a second, initially stationary, object (Object B) into motion, which gave a strong impression of apparent causality. The apparent effectiveness of A's movement was manipulated by varying the velocities of A and B. When the velocity of B was higher than that of A, the effectiveness of the collision was high; when it was smaller it was low. Then, subjects were asked to reproduce the velocity of the causal movement. Reproduced velocity followed the velocity of both Object A and Object B, which supports the hypothesis that the effect of a movement is integrated with its apparent cause. However, when apparent causality was reduced by changing the direction of motion of B or by covering the point of collision, the influence of the effect on the representation of the cause persisted, suggesting that retroactive interference may account for the findings. The interference effect could not be reduced to temporal recency or spatial integration and was not obtained in the reverse temporal order (proactive interference). Rather, the two successive movements were blended in memory.     

Individual classification of elementary school children’s physical activity: A time-efficient,group-based approach to reference measurements

The objective measurement of physical activity using accelerometers is becoming increasingly popular. There is little consensus, however, about how to analyze acceleration data. One promising approach is the use of reference measurements in which the subjects conduct specific activities. This makes it possible to identify data patterns that indicate these activities for each subject. The drawback of this approach is its rather high cost, in terms of both time and money. We propose a new approach in which a group of children conduct the reference measurements at the same time. We trained support vector machine models on the accelerometer data of 70 children (ages 8–11 years) to predict their activities during those reference measurements. We correctly classified activities with an accuracy of 96.9 % when fitting the individual models for each subject, and 87.5 % when fitting general models for all subjects. The obtained accuracies were comparable to results reported in previous reference measurement studies, in which each subject was measured individually. They were higher than the accuracies obtained by the traditional approach, which transfers accelerometer data to counts and classifies those on the basis of predefined cut points. We concluded that our approach can yield a valuable contribution, particularly to studies with larger samples.