Abstract
Recent motivational affective priming studies (Moors & De Houwer, 2001; Moors, De Houwer, & Eelen, 2004) showed that primes that indicate success on a goal-inducing task facilitate positive target responses whereas primes that indicate failure on that task facilitate negative target responses. In the current studies, we examined whether these priming effects depend on consciously intentional processing of the motivational valence of the primes. In Experiment 1, the outcome of success or failure was presented not only immediately before the target (i.e., the prime) but also a second time after the target response. This should encourage participants to ignore the prime. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to respond to the targets within 600 ms after target onset. As a result, participants had little opportunity to process the motivational prime valence in a consciously intentional way. Nevertheless, strong affective priming effects were found in both studies. These results provide additional support for the claim that motivational valence can be processed without the conscious intention to do so.
Acknowledgments
Preparation of this manuscript was supported by Grant G.0326.01 from the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders, Belgium) to Paul Eelen and Jan De Houwer and by Grant BOF 011 012 03 from the Special Research Fund to Jan De Houwer.
We would like to thank Klaus Rothermund for his suggestion to run Experiment 2.
Notes
For the further refinement of positive and negative emotions into specific emotions such as happiness, pride, anger, fear, sadness, and shame, other appraisal components have been put forward such as type of concern, accountability, coping potential, and future expectancy, to name just a few.
It is important to note that from different perspectives, theorists have put a different emphasis on different features of automaticity (such as efficient, unintentional, unconscious, uncontrollable, and fast). Whereas the early approach defined automaticity primarily in terms of efficiency (i.e., independence of attentional resources), more recent approaches distinguish between different types of automatic process, some dependent, others independent of attention, and retaining autonomy as the minimal criterion for automaticity (e.g., CitationBargh, 1992, Citation1997). Consistent with Bargh's view, we aim to investigate each automaticity feature separately. In addition, because we conceive of each automaticity feature as a continuum (also see CitationLogan, 1985), we believe it is justified to adduce arguments in favour of the presence of these features even when these arguments do not demonstrate the total presence or absence of these features.
These studies were not about automatic processing of prime valence, as prime durations were very long.
We do not aim to rule out that processing of motivational valence is not mediated by an unconscious goal to process motivational valence, for this seems virtually impossible. With respect to terminology, it should be noted that whereas according to some authors, the term “intentional” implies the conscious choice of a processing goal, we prefer using the term “intentional” merely to indicate that the process was produced by the subject's goal to engage in the process, irrespective of whether this goal was consciously or unconsciously activated. Because we do not share the position that the term “intentional” includes “consciousness”, we consistently speak about “conscious intentions” or “without conscious intentions”.
Because our participants were Dutch, the game rules were presented in Dutch (“geel” = 10, “blauw” = 10) as were the alternating letters (G, B) that indicated the colours.
Again the game rules and the alternating letters of the goal-inducing task were presented in Dutch (“dier” = 10, “beroep” = 10, D, B).
However, suppose that only a few combinations of parameter values would be stored in memory and that new, never encountered combinations would have to trigger the stored ones on the basis of similarity. One obvious question may then be: Given that only subtle changes in the stimulus configuration are really dangerous (such as when a car that is driving next to you slightly turns in your direction), how does the system determine which change is similar enough to a stored configuration, and which change is not. In other words, it seems that some kind of threshold may be required even for a memory account to deliver sufficiently flexible outcomes. Any explanation invoking a threshold at some point requires a comparison between the input and that threshold.