Response-bound primes diminish affective priming in the naming task

Abstract

We found affective priming in the naming task (i.e., faster naming of a target picture that follows a valence-congruent prime picture compared to an incongruent prime) significantly reduced if prime stimuli were strongly bound to a naming response compared to when primes did not elicit a naming response. This result indicates that affective priming in the naming task originates from encoding facilitation processes, which are usually overshadowed by response conflict due to primes that also trigger a naming response.

Acknowledgements

We thank Gabriele Schmitt for her help with data collection.

Notes

¹In fact, in one experiment, Spruyt and colleagues (2002, Experiment 3) found a 4 ms effect (p<.05, one-tailed) if pictures were preceded by word primes. We will return to this issue in the discussion.

²Of course, this does not explain the failures to find affective priming in nearly exact replications (Klauer & Musch, 2001; Spruyt et al., 2004b), which might have different causes (e.g., no semantic encoding of targets; see above).