Contextual positivity-familiarity effects are unaffected by known moderators of misattribution

ABSTRACT

The positivity-familiarity effect refers to the phenomenon that positive affect increases the likelihood that people judge a stimulus as familiar. Drawing on the assumption that positivity-familiarity effects result from a common misattribution mechanism that is shared with conceptually similar effects (e.g. fluency-familiarity effects), we investigated whether positivity-familiarity effects are qualified by three known moderators of other misattribution phenomena: (a) conceptual similarity between affect-eliciting prime stimuli and focal target stimuli, (b) relative salience of affect-eliciting prime stimuli, and (c) explicit warnings about the effects of affect-eliciting prime stimuli on familiarity judgments of the targets. Counter to predictions, three experiments obtained robust positivity-familiarity effects that were unaffected by the hypothesised moderators. The findings pose a challenge for misattribution accounts of positivity-familiarity effects, but they are consistent with alternative accounts in terms of affective monitoring.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• familiarity
• fluency
• misattribution
• priming

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Society of Personality and Social Psychology under a small research grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All experiments reported below were approved by the ethics committee of the University of Hull, and informed consent was obtained before participants started the task. Based on earlier studies with a similar paradigm (Weil et al., 2020), the sample size for each study was determined beforehand with the requirement of 75 participants per cell in Experiment 1 and 2, and 90 participants per cell in Experiment 3 to compensate for participants who incorrectly answered a set of comprehension questions (see below). Data collection was stopped once the required sample size was reached. Slightly larger samples resulted from participants who completed the experiment but did not request their compensation immediately after the study. If these participants asked for their compensation later, it was granted retroactively. The data for each experiment were collected in one shot without prior statistical analyses. We report all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures. All materials, data, and analysis codes are available at https://osf.io/cbr84/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Society of Personality and Social Psychology under a small research grant.