Affective and Identity Priming with Episodically Associated Stimuli

Abstract

In the present experiments, participants first memorised a set of nonword word pairs. During a subsequent priming phase, the nonwords and words served as primes and targets respectively. We examined (a) whether a nonword facilitates the processing of target words with the same valence as the word with which the nonword was associated, relative to target words with a different valence (episodic affective priming) and (b) whether priming is most pronounced for the specific word that was associated with the nonword (episodic identity priming). When target words were affectively categorised as positive or negative (Experiments 1 and 3), significant episodic affective priming was observed. This result was only obtained with short (300msec) but not long (1000msec) delays between the onset of target and prime, suggesting that the observed affective priming effects were due to automatic processes. Nonwords also influenced the affective categorisation of affectively congruent targets that were not presented during the learning phase (Experiment 4). Additional identity priming was observed in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 3. When target words were pronounced (Experiment 2), only identity priming was found. The implications of these results for the study of affective priming, episodic priming, implicit memory, and evaluative conditioning are discussed.