In the IAT, like the affective priming task, participants categorize words. That is the same logic behind perhaps the most common test of implicit attitudes, the Implicit Association Test or IAT (for more, see, and Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). But what about ambiguous words or stimuli? Is 'blue' positive if it's someone's favorite color? If that person is primed with 'happy' and responds more quickly to 'blue' than to 'red', that suggests a positive association with the word blue. 'Joy' speeds responses to 'happy' because we expect people to have positive associations with both those words. One implication of affective priming effects is that they can be used to infer attitudes. When the target matches that attitude, the response is made more quickly. Presumably, this occurs because the prime automatically and subconsciously 'activates' a particular attitude (like pleasantness or unpleasantness).

When the emotional valences of the prime and target match, words are categorized faster than when the emotional valences do not match. The subliminal word (the prime) sometimes matches the emotional valence of the target word (e.g., 'joy' primes 'happy'), and sometimes does not (e.g., 'joy' primes 'death'). But unknown to the participant, each word is preceded by a subliminally presented word. In an affective priming task, participants perform a simple categorization task, such as judging whether words (e.g., 'death', 'happy') are good or bad.

One demonstration of such implicit attitudes is the evaluative or affective priming task (see e.g., Fazio et al., 1986). But emotions can also be implicit and subconscious, in that we may not consciously feel them or be aware of what triggered them.Įven when experienced subconsciously, implicit attitudes influence our behavior. In all those examples, we're consciously aware of the emotion and, usually, what induced it (the other driver, the book, the bug). We often have emotional experiences: a flash of anger when someone cuts us off in traffic, moments of pleasure when reading a good book, or being frightened when seeing a bug out of the corner of our eye.

Angry red button no flash