Juliane Degner

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.

On the (un-)controllability of affective priming: Strategic manipulation is feasible but can possibly be prevented

Three studies are presented that explored if and to what extent affective priming effects in a standard affective priming paradigm are susceptible to voluntary control. Specifically, it was tested was whether participants were able to eliminate or amplify affective priming effects when instructed to do so. In Experiment 1, it was shown that participants were successful in implementing manipulation instructions to decrease or eliminate the effect. Experiment 2 showed that such manipulation attempts succeeded in the opposite direction too, with participants voluntarily enhancing priming effects. Furthermore, it was shown that such manipulation effects could only partly be prevented by shortening duration of prime presentation and stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target. The first two studies thus proved the susceptibility of the affective priming paradigm to spontaneous and strategic manipulation intentions of participants. However, when a moderate time pressure was induced by implementing a response deadline in Experiment 3, manipulation efforts failed. Implications of these results for the application of the affective priming paradigm in attitude research, specifically in socially sensitive domains, are discussed.

Emotionality in a second language: It's a matter of time

The present study investigated the well acknowledged phenomenon of a different sense of emotionality in a persons first (L1) and second language (L2). Event-related potentials were recorded during the reading of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral words in L1 and L2. Enhanced processing of both emotional compared to neutral words was reflected in an amplified early posterior negativity (EPN) about 280-430 ms after word onset. While the EPN did not differ in amplitude between L1 and L2, it was delayed for L2. Interestingly, a better task performance in L2 but not L1 predicted longer delays of the EPN. These results might indicate that the affective valence of L2 words is processed in a less immediate way due to delayed lexical access. This is interpreted in terms of interference in a highly integrated L1/L2 mental lexicon.

Hostility-Related Prejudice Against Turks in Adolescents: Masked Affective Priming Allows for a Differentiation of Automatic Prejudice

The masked affective priming task was used as an unobtrusive measure of intergroup prejudices in a sample of German adolescents (aged 13–15). Pictures of Turks and Germans were used as masked primes that preceded positive and negative target adjectives conveying either other-relevant valence (e.g., honest, evil) or possessor-relevant valence (e.g., talented, dull). Affective priming indices (denoting relative negativity of Turkish primes) were positively correlated with the open expression of prejudices towards Turks and foreigners in general in questionnaires as well as with discriminative interaction behavior in a virtual ball-tossing game. As expected, these correlations were found only for priming indices based on other-relevant targets, thereby emphasizing the differentiation of automatic prejudice into (imputed) hostility and depreciation.

Assessing Automatic Activation of Valence A Multinomial Model of EAST Performance

The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; De Houwer, 2003) has been introduced as an indirect measure of automatic activation of valence. EAST effects provide nonrelative valence measures of single stimuli compared to relative measures (e.g., Implicit Association Test) that imply a comparison between two stimuli or concepts. However, EAST effects can be biased by response tendencies. A multinomial process dissociation model of EAST performance is proposed and successfully validated in four experiments. Its parameters provide pure and unbiased measures of automatic valence activation, controlled processing of task-relevant features, and response tendency. A first application of latent-class hierarchical multinomial models reveals a significant amount of parameter heterogeneity resulting from interindividual differences in accuracy motivation.

It matters how much you talk: On the automaticity of affective connotations of first and second language words

We report the results of an affective priming study conducted with proficient sequential German and French bilinguals to assess automatic affective word processing in L1 and L2. Additionally, a semantic priming task was conducted in both languages. Whereas semantic priming effects occurred in L1 and L2, and significant affective priming effects were found in L1, affective priming effects in L2 were only found for participants with high levels of language immersion and frequency of L2 use. These results suggest that for sequential bilinguals the intensity of L2 use largely determines whether emotional words in L2 automatically activate their affective connotations.

Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations

An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task. Faces with happy, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral expressions were presented as masked primes for 33 ms (Study 1) or 14 ms (Studies 2 and 3) followed by emotional target faces (Studies 1 and 2) or emotional adjectives (Study 3). Participants’ task was to categorise the target emotion. In all three studies, discrimination of targets was significantly affected by the emotional primes beyond a simple positive versus negative distinction. Results indicate that specific aspects of emotions might be automatically disentangled in addition to valence, even under conditions of subjective unawareness.

Indirect Assessment of Attitudes with Response-Time-Based Measures

Abstract: We review research on response-latency based (“implicit”) measures of attitudes by examining what hopes and intentions researchers have associated with their usage. We identified the hopes of (1) gaining better measures of interindividual differences in attitudes as compared to self-report measures (quality hope); (2) better predicting behavior, or predicting other behaviors, as compared to self-reports (incremental validity hope); (3) linking social-cognitive theories more adequately to empirical research (theory-link hope). We argue that the third hope should be the starting point for using these measures. Any attempt to improve these measures should include the search for a small-scale theory that adequately explains the basic effects found with such a measure. To date, small-scale theories for different measures are not equally well developed.

The “emotion misattribution” procedure: Processing beyond good and bad under masked and unmasked presentation conditions

In general, it is assumed that misattribution in the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is restricted to crude affect due to its unbound nature, especially under limited presentation conditions. In two experiments, we investigated whether emotion-specific misattributions occur using a four-category misattribution procedure. Experiment 1 yielded emotion-specific misattribution effects under clearly visible presentation conditions demonstrating that the procedure is principally susceptible for emotion-specific effects. In Experiment 2, we employed masked presentation conditions impeding conscious prime perception. A specific pattern of emotion-specific misattributions effects emerged indicating some emotion-specific processing at initial stages of processing. However, not each emotion was misattributed equally. We discuss the implications of these results for the non-conscious processing of emotional information, for the supposed mechanisms of the AMP and its implicit nature.

Affective priming with auditory speech stimuli

Four experiments explored the applicability of auditory stimulus presentation in affective priming tasks. In Experiment 1, it was found that standard affective priming effects occur when prime and target words are presented simultaneously via headphones similar to a dichotic listening procedure. In Experiment 2, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied in the same procedure. Significant priming effects occurred only when prime and target stimuli were presented simultaneously or partly overlapping (SOA = 250 ms), but not if they were presented clearly separable (SOA = 500 ms). In Experiment 3, an auditory masking procedure was implemented with binaural prime and target presentation to demonstrate that auditory priming effects also occur under conditions of limited prime awareness. In Experiment 4, an unmasked auditory priming procedure with binaural prime and target presentations generated comparable affective priming effects in a social attitude domain (i.e., intergroup attitudes). Results of all four experiments show that affective priming effects can be found with auditory presented stimuli, thus enlarging the tool box of affective priming research.