The Comparision Of Subliminal And Supralininal EC Effect Sizes And The Influce Of Self-Correction

Preferences can be seen as the antecedents of human behavior. The tendency of behavior plays a decisive role. How to change the preferences for certain things and then trigger the appropriate behavior has become a hot thing in the background of social applications and psychological researches. The technique used in changing preference is called Evaluative Conditioning [EC]. EC refers to a psychological phenomenon that by pairing a neutral stimulus [Conditioned Stimulus, CS] with a preferred stimulus (Unconditioned Stimulus, referred to as US), one can change the preference of the neutral stimulus.There are a lot of researches on how EC affects preferences. However, in most cases, supraliminal stimulus was used. Direct comparison of the effect size between supraliminal and subliminal stimulus under EC effect are rare. Whether EC effect can be consciously corrected is a problem that few researches focus on. No researches emphasis on the comparison of correcting effect between subliminal EC and supraliminal EC. According to this situation, this study asks three questions:first, whether subliminal and supraliminal EC effect is genuine? Second, considering subliminal and supraliminal EC effect, which one is greater? Third, whether awareness correcting can influence the EC effect?In study1, neutral Korean characters were used as CS and preferred Chinese were used as US. We presented CS-US pairs to the participants and after that used a7-point scale to assess theirs preferences changing. The results showed that the effect of the EC is significant.In Study2, we respectively used three kinds of CS-US pairs:supraliminal CS-subliminal US, subliminal CS-supraliminal US, supraliminal CS-subliminal CS as three experimental treatments. The results showed that in the first experimental treatment, we found significantly EC effect. In the second, we did not find the EC effect and in the third, we found no artificial EC effect. By comparing the effect sizes of EC effect which are found in Study1and Study2, we found the supraliminal effect is significant larger than that of the subliminal effect.In Study3, we inserted the correcting guidance language to counterbalance the EC effect and to see whether consciously corrective effect can influence EC in subliminal and supraliminal conditions. The results showed that the EC effect can be awareness corrected and the corrective effect is stronger in supraliminal condition.