| Processing occurs in such a way that the crude, evaluative aspects of an object are registered prior to more complex and elaborative forms of stimulus appraisal. These early affective responses to a stimulus have a compelling influence on subsequent processing. When participants are briefly exposed to a positive or negative stimulus (prime), they make corresponding affective judgments with regard to a second stimulus (target). Until recently, these effects have only been obtained when the affective primes were presented outside of perceptual awareness (Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993). This was presumably because primes within awareness are available for more complex and strategic forms of processing which prevent the affective response from being displaced onto the target. However, recent research has demonstrated that perceptually conscious affective primes are able to influence future evaluations of a neutral target object (Bohraus, Wong, & Islam, 2002; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005; Wong & Root, 2003), raising questions about the role of strategic processes in affective priming.;The present research examined whether affective responses to perceptually conscious picture primes are susceptible to strategic efforts to control their influence on subsequent processing. That is, can participants enhance or prevent their initial affective response to the prime from influencing their evaluation of a neutral ideograph that follows it? Experiment 1 sought to investigate affective priming at extended levels of perceptual awareness using positive and negative complex visual scenes. Significant priming effects were obtained, demonstrating that participants' affective response to the prime had a corresponding influence on preference for ideographs despite participants' awareness of the primes. Experiment 2 examined whether these effects resist strategic attempts to amplify or inhibit the prime's influence through instructional manipulations. Participants were unable to control their initial affective response to the primes regardless of explicit warnings about the primes' potential impact. Experiment 3 utilized a similar manipulation aimed at shifting participants' attention toward or away from the emotional content of the primes. The priming effect remained even when participants were distracted from the emotional content of the pictures. Together, these studies suggest that affective priming at extended levels of perceptual awareness is a stable and consistent finding, and that our initial affective responses may be more difficult to modify than was originally suspected. |
