The extrinsic affective Simon task as an instrument for indirect assessment of prejudice

We report one study that explored the applicability of the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST) as an indirect measure of prejudice. The EAST detected known differences in reactions revealing that a Turkish outgroup was spontaneously evaluated more negatively than the German ingroup. More importantly, EAST effects were meaningfully correlated with measures of explicit prejudice expression. This relation, however, was moderated by participants' motivation to control prejudice expression. In addition, we tested considerations regarding the role of a task‐switch account for the explanation of EAST scores and found that only EAST scores of task‐switch trials were related to explicit prejudice expression. This supports a task‐switch explanation of the EAST. Results indicate that the EAST is suitable for the assessment of interindividual differences in intergroup prejudice. Implications for the indirect assessment of automatic prejudice activation are discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Design and power analysis: n and confidence intervals of means

In this study, we analyzed the validity of the conventional 80% power. The minimal sample size and power needed to guarantee non-overlapping (1-alpha)% confidence intervals for population means were calculated. Several simulations indicate that the minimal power for two means (m = 2) to have non-overlapping CIs is .80, for (1-alpha) set to 95%. The minimal power becomes .86 for 99% CIs and .75 for 90% CIs. When multiple means are considered, the required minimal power increases considerably. This increase is even higher when the population means do not increase monotonically. Therefore, the often adopted criterion of a minimal power equal to .80 is not always adequate. Hence, to guarantee that the limits of the CIs do not overlap, most situations require a direct calculation of the minimum number of observations that should enter in a study.     

Associations between emotions: correspondence across different types of data and componential basis

Two issues regarding associations between negative emotions are addressed: (i) whether different types of data imply similar associations and (ii) whether these associations can be accounted for by the overlap between emotion components. In study 1, issue (i) was examined using individual differences covariation, situational covariation, and judged emotion similarity data. Results showed that the associations implied by the different data types were highly similar. Regarding issue (ii), we argue theoretically that component overlap may account for the obtained correspondence. Study 2 empirically demonstrated that the different types of association were strongly related to overlap in appraisals and action tendencies. Similarity judgments, however, seemed to be primarily based on emotion co‐occurrence, and were only to a smaller degree directly related to component overlap. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anticipated Success at Unconscious Goal Pursuit: Consequences for Mood, Self-Esteem, and the Evaluation of a Goal-Relevant Task

This study extends recent research showing that fulfillment of unconscious goals can have the same affective consequences as fulfillment of conscious goals (T. L. Chartrand, 2001). Participants were unobtrusively primed with stimuli either relevant or irrelevant to the goal to seek knowledge. Next, an opportunity to fulfill the knowledge-seeking goal was announced (i.e., a test and subsequent feedback on a fictitious cognitive ability). As expected, participants in the knowledge-goal condition responded more positively to the announcement in terms of mood, self-esteem, and test evaluation than did participants in the no-goal condition. Consistent with a motivational account, the priming procedure did not influence mood and self-esteem when these variables were measured before test announcement.     

Affective priming with subliminally presented pictures.

Affective priming studies have demonstrated that subliminally presented prime words can exert an influence on responses towards positive or negative target stimuli. In the present series of experiments, it was investigated whether these findings can be extended to pictorial stimuli. Ideographically selected positive, neutral, and negative picture primes that were sandwich-masked immediately preceded positive or negative target pictures (Experiment 1) or words (Experiments 2 & 3). Evaluative categorization responses to these target stimuli were significantly influenced by the valence of the prime. First, it was demonstrated that high anxious participants were selectively slowed when the subliminally presented prime was negative (Experiments 1 & 2). Second, the affective congruence between primes and targets also exerted an influence on the responses, but in a direction that is opposite to what is typically observed in affective priming research. These reverse priming effects are situated within a series of recent similar findings, and implications for theories of affective priming are discussed.     

Recognition memory for low- and high-frequency-filtered emotional faces: Low spatial frequencies drive emotional memory enhancement,whereas high spatial frequencies drive the emotion-induced recognition bias

This article deals with two well-documented phenomena regarding emotional stimuli: emotional memory enhancement—that is, better long-term memory for emotional than for neutral stimuli—and the emotion-induced recognition bias—that is, a more liberal response criterion for emotional than for neutral stimuli. Studies on visual emotion perception and attention suggest that emotion-related processes can be modulated by means of spatial-frequency filtering of the presented emotional stimuli. Specifically, low spatial frequencies are assumed to play a primary role for the influence of emotion on attention and judgment. Given this theoretical background, we investigated whether spatial-frequency filtering also impacts (1) the memory advantage for emotional faces and (2) the emotion-induced recognition bias, in a series of old/new recognition experiments. Participants completed incidental-learning tasks with high- (HSF) and low- (LSF) spatial-frequency-filtered emotional and neutral faces. The results of the surprise recognition tests showed a clear memory advantage for emotional stimuli. Most importantly, the emotional memory enhancement was significantly larger for face images containing only low-frequency information (LSF faces) than for HSF faces across all experiments, suggesting that LSF information plays a critical role in this effect, whereas the emotion-induced recognition bias was found only for HSF stimuli. We discuss our findings in terms of both the traditional account of different processing pathways for HSF and LSF information and a stimulus features account. The double dissociation in the results favors the latter account—that is, an explanation in terms of differences in the characteristics of HSF and LSF stimuli.     

ADPROCLUS: a graphical user interface for fitting additive profile clustering models to object by variable data matrices

In many areas of psychology, one is interested in disclosing the underlying structural mechanisms that generated an object by variable data set. Often, based on theoretical or empirical arguments, it may be expected that these underlying mechanisms imply that the objects are grouped into clusters that are allowed to overlap (i.e., an object may belong to more than one cluster). In such cases, analyzing the data with Mirkin’s additive profile clustering model may be appropriate. In this model: (1) each object may belong to no, one or several clusters, (2) there is a specific variable profile associated with each cluster, and (3) the scores of the objects on the variables can be reconstructed by adding the cluster-specific variable profiles of the clusters the object in question belongs to. Until now, however, no software program has been publicly available to perform an additive profile clustering analysis. For this purpose, in this article, the ADPROCLUS program, steered by a graphical user interface, is presented. We further illustrate its use by means of the analysis of a patient by symptom data matrix.     

The effect of color (red versus blue) on assimilation versus contrast in prime-to-behavior effects

This paper examines whether color can modify the way that primed constructs affect behavior. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that, compared to the color white, blue is more likely to lead to assimilative shifts in behavior, whereas red is more likely to lead to contrastive changes in behavior. In our experiment, previous findings were replicated in the white color condition: participants’ behavior assimilated to primed stereotypes of (un)intelligence and contrasted away from primed exemplars of (un)intelligence. However, in the blue color condition, participants’ behavior assimilated to the primed constructs, whereas in the red color condition, participants’ behavior contrasted away from the primed constructs, irrespective of whether the primed constructs were stereotypes or exemplars.     

The Servant Leadership Survey: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Measure

Purpose  

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and validation of a multi-dimensional instrument to measure servant leadership.     

Time-course of feature-based top-down control in saccadic distractor effects

Saccadic reaction time (SRT) is more strongly slowed by target-similar than dissimilar distractors (similarity effect). The time course of this similarity effect was investigated by varying target contrast and analyzing SRT distributions. With foveal distractors, the similarity effect increased with increasing SRT, suggesting that top-down enhancement of target features increased over time. This allowed for successful saccades to the peripheral target, but also entailed larger distraction by target-similar stimuli. Similarity effects with peripheral distractors did not increase with SRT, which we attribute to location-based inhibition containing the growing enhancement of target features. Strong inhibition was likely with peripheral distractors because they always appeared at the same task-irrelevant location. Prior inhibition with foveal distractors was weaker because this would have partially released fixation and entailed anticipations.