Subjective, physiological, and behavioural responses towards evaluatively conditioned stimuli

ABSTRACT

Evaluative Conditioning (EC) is commonly defined as the change in liking of a stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) due to its pairings with an affective unconditioned stimulus (US). In Experiment 1, we investigated effects of repeated stimulus pairings on affective responses, i.e. valence and arousal ratings, pupil size, and duration estimation. After repeatedly pairing the CSs with affective USs, a consistent pattern of affective responses emerged: The CS_negative was rated as being more negative and more arousing, resulted in larger pupils, and was temporally overestimated compared to the CS_neutral. In Experiment 2, the influence of a mere instruction about the contingency between a CS and US on affective responses was examined. After mere instruction about upcoming pairings between the CS and US, subjective ratings also changed, but there was neither evidence for differential pupillary responses nor for differential temporal processing. The results indicate that EC via pairings or instructions can change the affective responses towards formerly neutral stimuli and introduce pupil size as a physiological measure in EC research. However, Experiment 2 suggests that there might be moderating factors based on the type of EC procedure involved.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluative conditioning
• affective response
• pupillometry
• duration estimation
• instruction

Acknowledgement

We want to thank Melanie Wagner, Nadine Werian, and Mitja Dürring for their assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The data as well as additional information about the analyses (e.g. observed power) is available at https://osf.io/f7g59.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the LGFG-scholarship (scholarship according to the German Landesgraduiertenfoerderungsgesetz) awarded by Ulm University and by the SFB/TRR 62 “Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems” awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).