title: The positivity proportion effect: a list context effect in masked affective priming.
abstract: In the evaluative decision task, participants decide whether target words denote something positive or negative. Positive and negative prime words are known to engender so-called affective priming effects in this task. Primes were sandwich masked, and the proportion of positive to negative target words was manipulated. In Experiment 1, prime valence and positivity proportion interacted, so that primes of the less frequently presented target valence caused larger priming effects. Experiment 2 rendered an explanation of this interaction in terms of response bias unlikely, Experiment 3 ruled out a peripheral locus of the effect, and Experiment 4 ruled out an account in terms of stimulus repetition. The effect is explained by means of an attentional bias favoring the rare kind of valence.
authors.affiliation: Psychologisches Institut, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany. christoph.klauer@uni-bonn.de
authors.forename: Karl Christoph
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Klauer
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mierke
authors.forename: Jochen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Musch
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014825:Vocabulary