Children's implicit attitude acquisition: Evaluative statements succeed,repeated pairings fail

From the earliest ages tested, children and adults show similar overall magnitudes of implicit attitudes toward various social groups. However, such consistency in attitude magnitude may obscure meaningful age‐related change in the ways that children (vs. adults) acquire implicit attitudes. This experiment investigated children's implicit attitude acquisition by comparing the separate and joint effects of two learning interventions, previously shown to form implicit attitudes in adults. Children (N = 280, ages 7–11 years) were taught about novel social groups through either evaluative statements (ES; auditorily presented verbal statements such as ‘Longfaces are bad, Squarefaces are good’), repeated evaluative pairings (REP; visual pairings of Longface/Squareface group members with valenced images such as a puppy or snake), or a combination of ES+REP. Results showed that children acquired implicit attitudes following ES and ES+REP, with REP providing no additional learning beyond ES alone. Moreover, children did not acquire implicit attitudes in four variations of REP, each designed to facilitate learning by systematically increasing verbal scaffolding to specify (a) the learning goal, (b) the valence of the unconditioned stimuli, and (c) the group categories of the conditioned stimuli. These findings underscore the early‐emerging role of verbal statements in children's implicit attitude acquisition, as well as a possible age‐related limit in children's acquisition of novel implicit attitudes from repeated pairings.     

The Effect of Counterconditioning on Evaluative Responses and Harm Expectancy in a Fear Conditioning Paradigm

In fear conditioning, extinction targets harm expectancy as well as the fear response, but it often fails to eradicate the negative affective value that is associated with the conditioned stimulus. In the present study, we examined whether counterconditioning can serve to reduce evaluative responses within fear conditioning. The sample consisted of 70 nonselected students, 12 of whom were men. All participants received acquisition with human face stimuli as the conditioned stimuli and an unpleasant white noise as the unconditioned stimulus. After acquisition, one third of the sample was allocated to an extinction procedure. The other participants received counterconditioning with either a neutral stimulus (neutral tone) or a positive stimulus (baby laugh). Results showed that counterconditioning (with both neutral and positive stimuli), in contrast to extinction, successfully reduced evaluative responses. This effect was found on an indirect measure (affective priming task), but not on self-report. Counterconditioning with a positive stimulus also tended to enhance the reduction of conditioned skin conductance reactivity. The present data suggest that counterconditioning procedures might be a promising approach in diminishing evaluative learning and even expectancy learning in the context of fear conditioning.     

普萘洛尔修复即刻消退产生的二次创伤

恐惧消退能力的受损是创伤后应激障碍(posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD)的标志之一。以往的研究表明, 相较于延迟消退, 恐惧获得后短时间内进行的消退训练不能形成长时程的消退记忆, 这一现象被称为即刻消退缺损。然而, 目前并不清楚这种缺损是一次性的, 还是会继续影响其后的重消退。实验1中, 大鼠在恐惧习得后1小时(即刻消退)或24小时(延迟消退)开始进行消退训练, 24小时后进行重消退, 再24小时后进行消退记忆的测试。结果显示, 与延迟消退相比, 即刻消退效果缺损, 并引起第二天的重消退也出现效果缺损。实验2中, 恐惧获得后立即给予大鼠盐水或β-肾上腺素受体阻断剂普萘洛尔(10 mg/kg, i.p.), 然后测试即刻消退和重消退的效果。结果显示, 普萘洛尔虽没有阻止即刻消退的缺损, 但避免了重消退出现缺损。总之, 严重创伤后的即刻消退不但无法有效抑制恐惧反应, 还可能造成二次创伤, 会损害恐惧消退能力, 而普萘洛尔可修复即刻消退引起的重消退缺损。这些结果将有助于我们加深对PTSD病理机制和早期干预后果的认识。     

Attribute conditioning: Changing attribute-assessments through mere pairings

We propose Attribute Conditioning (AC) as a form of learning that refers to changes in people's assessment of stimuli's (CSs) attributes due to repeated pairing with stimuli possessing these attributes (USs). We review the available evidence and, based on this review, delineate three open questions and investigate them experimentally: a) the moderating role of CS-US similarity; b) the possibility of blocking; and c) the possibility of extinction. Five experiments conditioned health and athleticism. We measured AC effects on direct and indirect dependent variables (direct ratings and semantic misattribution). Experiment 1 shows that CS-US feature similarity does not moderate AC. Experiments 2 and 3 show that AC effects are insensitive to blocking; and Experiments 4 and 5 show that AC effects are resistant to extinction. These five experiments show that AC depends on CS-US contiguity, but not on CS-US contingency. Thereby, the study establishes AC as a simple learning phenomenon describing how people, stimuli, and concepts acquire specific attributes in people's minds due to mere pairings.     

A Psychometric Comparison of Narcotic Addicts With Hospital Attendants

This study sought to determine the effect of a single intraperitoneal injection of methylchloroethamine on the long-term activity response of immature, male, Holtzmann albino rats. The 10 experimental Ss showed a significant progressive decline in activity up to 110 days after injection. The activity of the control Ss over the same period showed random variation. A subsidiary finding was a significantly faster weight gain for the experimental Ss than for the control Ss.     

The role of response inhibition in temporal preparation: Evidence from a go/no-go task

During the foreperiod (FP) of a warned reaction task, participants engage in a process of temporal preparation to speed response to the impending target stimulus. Previous neurophysiological studies have shown that inhibition is applied during FP to prevent premature response. Previous behavioral studies have shown that the duration of FP on both the current and the preceding trial codetermine response time to the target. Integrating these findings, the present study tested the hypothesis that the behavioral effects find their origin in response inhibition on the preceding trial. In two experiments the variable-FP paradigm was combined with a go/no-go task, in which no-go stimuli required explicit response inhibition. The resulting data pattern revealed sequential effects of both FP (long or short) and response requirement (go or no-go), which could be jointly understood as expressions of response inhibition, consistent with the hypothesis.     

Of two minds or one? A registered replication of Rydell et al. (2006)

ABSTRACT

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is proposed as a mechanism of automatic preference acquisition in dual-process theories of attitudes (Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 692–731. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.5.692). Evidence for the automaticity of EC comes from studies claiming EC effects for subliminally presented stimuli. An impression-formation study showed a selective influence of briefly presented primes on implicitly measured attitudes, whereas supraliminally presented behavioural information about the target person was reflected in explicit ratings (Rydell, R. J., McConnell, A. R., Mackie, D. M., & Strain, L. M. (2006). Of two minds forming and changing valence-inconsistent implicit and explicit attitudes. Psychological Science, 17(11), 954–958. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01811.x) This finding is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence for dual process theories (Sweldens, S., Corneille, O., & Yzerbyt, V. (2014). The role of awareness in attitude formation through evaluative conditioning. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 18(2), 187–209. doi:10.1177/1088868314527832), and it is therefore crucial to assess its reliability and robustness. The present study presents two registered replications of the Rydell et al. (2006) study. In contrast to the original findings, the implicit measures did not reflect the valence of the subliminal primes in both studies.     

What you see is what will change: Evaluative conditioning effects depend on a focus on valence

This study investigated whether evaluative conditioning (EC) effects depend on an evaluative focus during the learning phase. An EC effect is a valence change of an originally neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus or CS) that is due to the former pairing with a positive or negative stimulus (unconditioned stimulus or US). In three experiments, the task focus during the conditioning phase was manipulated. Participants judged CS–US pairings either with respect to their valence or with respect to another stimulus dimension. EC effects on explicit and implicit measures were found when valence was task relevant but not when the non-valent stimulus dimension was task relevant. Two accounts for the valence focus effect are proposed: (1) An additional direct learning of the relation of CS and evaluative responses in the valence focus condition, or (2) a stronger activation of US valence in the valence focus condition compared to the non-valent focus condition.     

Targeting avoidance via compound extinction

ABSTRACT

Avoidance towards innocuous cues is a key diagnostic criterion across anxiety-related disorders. Importantly, the most effective intervention for anxiety-related disorders, exposure therapy with response prevention, sometimes does not prevent the relapse of anxiety's symptomatology. We tested whether extinction effects, the experimental proxy of exposure, are enhanced by increasing the discrepancy between the prediction of an unpleasant event happening (shock presentation), and the actual event (shock omission). Forty-eight individuals first saw pictures of three stimuli. Two pictures (CSA, CSB) were followed by a shock (US) and one (CS-) was not. Next, participants learned to avoid the US by pressing a computer key. An extinction and response prevention procedure followed. In the first part of it, participants saw unreinforced presentations of all CSs. In the second part, the single group saw unreinforced presentations of the CSA and CS-. The compound group encountered compound unreinforced presentations of the CSA and CSB, and separate presentations of the CS-. Return of avoidance and fear was tested after unsignalled presentations of the US. Compound extinction resulted in comparable reduction of fear and avoidance compared to standard extinction. We discuss how future research could enhance extinction effects by adding costs to the avoidance behaviour.     

The effect of evaluation on co-occurrence memory judgement

Three experiments tested the effect of an attitude towards an object on the memory judgement of whether this object co-occurred with positive versus negative stimuli. We induced positive or negative attitudes towards novel male stimuli, and paired each man with an equal number of positive and negative animals. In a memory test, participants reported more co-occurrences of same-valence man/animal pairs than opposite-valence pairs. This valence-compatibility effect occurred even when attitudes were induced after the pairing (Experiment 1), when participants knew that each man occurred with an equal number of positive and negative animals (Experiment 2), and in reports of clear memory of pairs that did not co-occur (Experiment 3). The present findings suggest that evaluation causes illusory correlation even when the co-occurring stimuli are not traits or behaviours attributed to the attitude object. The results question the validity of co-occurrence memory judgements as measures of co-occurrence awareness in evaluative conditioning (EC) research.