Ignoring 'brutal' will make 'numid' more pleasant but 'uyuvu' more unpleasant: The role of a priori pleasantness of unfamiliar stimuli in affective priming tasks

Based on assumptions borrowed from negative priming research, in two experiments an evaluative decision to a clearly valenced target word that was flanked by a positive or negative distractor (i.e., the “affective priming” technique in the tradition of of Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986) was followed by a pleasantness rating of an unfamiliar, senseless string of letters. Of main interest was whether an inhibition of the distractor valence affects the rating. Unexpectedly, it was found that the effect depended on subtle differences in the a priori pleasantness of the letter strings. For (relatively) less pleasant sounding strings, the rating was congruent to the prime whereas it was incongruent for (relatively) more pleasant sounding strings. In Experiment 3, the rating of the letter strings was preceded by a masked positive or negative prime only. The same pattern of congruence and incongruence effects emerged. The results are related to a matching account of negative priming.