Dirk Wentura

Underlying Processes in the Implicit Association Test: Dissociating Salience From Associations

The authors investigated whether effects of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) are influenced by salience asymmetries, independent of associations. Two series of experiments analyzed unique effects of salience by using nonassociated, neutral categories that differed in salience. In a 3rd series, salience asymmetries were manipulated experimentally while holding associations between categories constant. In a 4th series, valent associations of the target categories were manipulated experimentally while holding salience asymmetries constant. Throughout, IAT effects were found to depend on salience asymmetries. Additionally, salience asymmetries between categories were assessed directly with a visual search task to provide an independent criterion of salience asymmetries. Salience asymmetries corresponded to IAT effects and also accounted for common variance in IAT effects and explicit measures of attitudes or the self-concept.

Activation and Inhibition of Affective Information: for Negative Priming in the Evaluation Task

The affective congruency effect, wherein shorter response latencies are observed for affectively congruent prime-target pairs in the evaluation task (i.e. the target is evaluated as positive or negative) has often been interpreted in terms of a spread of activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. In the present article, it is argued that the effect might be due to a conflict between the responses that are activated by the prime and target, assuming that the prime serves as a distractor for processing the target. If such a conflict occurs, this would result in a negative priming effect, that is, an affective incongruency of prime (e.g. death) and target (e.g. wise) on trial n-1 (prime-trial) will result in a slowing of the response on trial n (probe-trial) if the probe target (e.g. lonely) is affectively congruent to the distractor of the prime-trial. This hypothesis was confirmed in Experiment 1 (N = 35) with a sequential presentation of distractor and target (i.e. SOA = 300msec) and furt...

Adaptive Resources of the Aging Self: Outlines of an Emergent Perspective:

The transition to old age has often been related to loss of control, depression, and lowered self-esteem. A different picture, however, begins to emerge from recent age-comparative studies. Cross-sectional and longitudinal findings from two larger studies in the age range from middle to late adulthood are presented which indicate that elderly people, while being perceptive of age-related developmental losses, are quite effective in maintaining a sense of control and a positive view of self and personal development. It is argued that the apparent resiliency of the aging self hinges on the interplay between two basic processes: (1) instrumental activities that aim at preventing or alleviating developmental losses in domains that are relevant to the individuals self-esteem and identity; (2) accommodative processes by which personal goals and frames of self-evaluation are adjusted to changes in action resources and functional capacities. Evidence is presented in support of the assumption that with advancing age, accommodative processes become increasingly important aspects of coping and life-management.

Retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations as a source of negative priming

Priming effects of ignored distractor words were investigated in a task-switching situation that allowed an orthogonal variation of priming and response compatibility between prime and probe. Across 3 experiments, the authors obtained a disordinal interaction of priming and response relation. Responding was delayed in the ignored repetition condition if different responses were required for identical stimuli in the prime and probe (negative priming). Repeating the prime distractor in the probe facilitated responding if the same response was required in the prime and in the probe (positive priming). The same pattern of results was replicated in a letter-matching task without task switching (Experiment 4). Findings lend support to a new model that explains negative priming in terms of an automatic retrieval of incidental stimulus-response associations.

About the impact of automaticity in the minimal group paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasks

Two experiments examined whether novel, minimal ingroups are automatically associated with positive affect while outgroups do not elicit such positive evaluative default. Participants were assigned to social categories in a typical minimal group setting and subsequently administered a masked priming task, i.e. prime words were not consciously recognized. Following either the presentation of a priori positive or negative words or the presentation of the group labels, participants classified adjectives with regard to their valence (positive/negative). In Experiment 1, a standard affective priming paradigm was realized with response latencies as dependent measures; in Experiment 2, a response window technique was used, with errors as crucial measure. In both studies, significant affective congruency effects emerged similarly for standard primes and category labels, indicating ingroup bias on an implicit level. Copyright

Affective priming of semantic categorisation responses

Fazio, Sanbonmatsu Powell, & Kardes, (1986) demonstrated that less time is needed to affectively categorise a target as positive or negative when it is preceded by a prime with the same valence (e.g., summer-honest) compared to when the target is preceded by a prime with a different valence (e.g., cancer-honest). Such effects could be due to spreading of activation within a semantic network and/or to Stroop-like response conflicts. If a spreading of activation mechanism operates in priming tasks, primes should also facilitate nonaffective semantic processing of affectively congruent targets. In Experiment 1, we failed to observe affective priming when participants responded on the basis of whether the target referred to a person or animal. Experiment 2 revealed significant affective priming when participants responded on the basis of the valence of the targets but not when the semantic category of the targets (person or object) was relevant, despite the fact that apart from the task, both conditions were identical. The present results suggest that affective priming in the affective categorisation task is primarily due to the operation of a Stroop-like response conflict mechanism.

Counter-regulation in affective attentional biases: A basic mechanism that warrants flexibility in emotion and motivation.

We investigated whether anticipating positive or negative future outcomes during goal pursuit has a modulatory effect on attentional biases for affectively congruent and incongruent distractor stimuli. In two experiments using a flanker task, we found that distractor interference of stimuli signaling opportunities or dangers was stronger after inducing an outcome focus of the opposite valence. The second experiment provided additional evidence that the incongruency effect reflects a global shift in affective attentional biases and is not mediated by changes in strategies or in the perceived valence of the stimuli. It is argued that counter-regulation in affective attentional biases serves an important function for the regulation of emotion and action.

Distractor repetitions retrieve previous responses to targets

Response retrieval theories assume that stimuli and responses become integrated into “event files” (Hommel, 1998) in memory so that a second encounter with a specific stimulus automatically retrieves the response that was previously associated with this stimulus. In this article, we tested a specific prediction of a recent variant of stimulus retrieval theories as introduced by Rothermund, Wentura, and De Houwer (2005): In selection tasks where target stimuli are accompanied by distractors, responses to target stimuli are automatically bound to distractor stimuli as well; repeating the distractor should retrieve the response to the target that formerly accompanied the distractor. In three experiments we confirmed this prediction: Distractor repetition facilitated responding in the probe in the case of response repetition whereas repeating the distractor delayed responding in the case of response change.

Automatic Prejudice in Childhood and Early Adolescence

Four cross-sectional studies are presented that investigated the automatic activation of prejudice in children and adolescents (aged 9 years to 15 years). Therefore, 4 different versions of the affective priming task were used, with pictures of ingroup and outgroup members being presented as prejudice-related prime stimuli. In all 4 studies, a pattern occurred that suggests a linear developmental increase of automatic prejudice with significant effects of outgroup negativity appearing only around the ages of 12 to 13 years. Results of younger children, on the contrary, did not indicate any effect of automatic prejudice activation. In contrast, prejudice effects in an Implicit Association Test (IAT) showed high levels of prejudice independent of age (Study 3). Results of Study 4 suggest that these age differences are due to age-related differences in spontaneous categorization processes. Introducing a forced-categorization into the affective priming procedure produced a pattern of results equivalent to that obtained with the IAT. These results suggest that although children are assumed to acquire prejudice at much younger ages, automatization of such attitudes might be related to developmental processes in early adolescence. We discuss possible theoretical implications of these results for a developmental theory of prejudice representation and automatization during childhood and adolescence.

Valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall.

Participants memorized target words in silence or while ignoring neutral or valent (positive or negative) distractor words that could be either possessor-relevant or other-relevant. Distractor words impaired recall performance, but valent distractor words caused more disruption than neutral distractors, and negative distractors caused more disruption than positive distractors. The results are problematic for explanations of the irrelevant speech effect within working memory models that do not specify an explicit role of attention in the maintenance of information for immediate serial recall.