Affective priming with auditory speech stimuli

Abstract

Four experiments explored the applicability of auditory stimulus presentation in affective priming tasks. In Experiment 1, it was found that standard affective priming effects occur when prime and target words are presented simultaneously via headphones similar to a dichotic listening procedure. In Experiment 2, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied in the same procedure. Significant priming effects occurred only when prime and target stimuli were presented simultaneously or partly overlapping (SOA = 250 ms), but not if they were presented clearly separable (SOA = 500 ms). In Experiment 3, an auditory masking procedure was implemented with binaural prime and target presentation to demonstrate that auditory priming effects also occur under conditions of limited prime awareness. In Experiment 4, an unmasked auditory priming procedure with binaural prime and target presentations generated comparable affective priming effects in a social attitude domain (i.e., intergroup attitudes). Results of all four experiments show that affective priming effects can be found with auditory presented stimuli, thus enlarging the tool box of affective priming research.

Keywords:

• Affective (evaluative) priming
• Auditory stimuli
• Automatic valence activation
• Automatic attitudes

Notes

¹Note that this explanation cannot account for affective priming effects in non-evaluative tasks like the pronunciation task (e.g., Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, & Hymes, 1996; De Houwer & Randell, 2004; Spruyt, Hermans, De Houwer, & Eelen, 2002), the lexical decision task (e.g., Hermans, Smeesters, De Houwer, & Eelen, 2002, study 3; Wentura, 2000), or a semantic categorisation task (e.g., Spruyt, De Houwer, Hermans, & Eelen, 2007) which turn the task into different paradigms that can be explained only by assuming different underlying processes.

²This database was obtained in a Belgian population and word connotation and use sometimes differ between Flemish and Dutch speakers. Therefore, stimulus selection was assisted by Dutch native speakers from the Netherlands to insure that only words with unambiguous positive and negative connotations were included.

³To promote the neutrality of intonation of the stimuli the following measures were taken: For each stimulus set, a larger number of stimuli were recorded and speakers were instructed to intonate each word five times: once in a strongly negatively and positively biased way, in a slightly positively and negatively biased way, and in a neutral way. Two groups of students (three Dutch native speakers in Experiment 1; four German native speakers in Experiment 2) listened to the words in a random order and tried to identify the emotional tone the speaker tried to create. Only those stimuli were selected for use in the current experiments for which such identifications were not possible.

⁴Analyses on untransformed response latencies produced the same significant main effects and interactions.

⁵Note that in these studies, priming effects might have appeared as more short-lived than normal due to the different locations of stimulus presentation.

⁶Because prime length slightly varied between stimuli, not all primes were fully vocalised at target onset in the SOA = 500 ms condition. However, posthoc analyses demonstrated that prime length did not significantly affect results.

⁷I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.

⁸The non-parametric signal detection index A′ was used instead of its equivalent d′ because d′ cannot be calculated for participants whose hit rate or false alarm rate was either zero or one (e.g., if they pressed one and the same response key throughout the direct test).