title: Evaluative stimulus (in)congruency impacts performance in an unrelated task: evidence for a resource-based account of evaluative priming.
abstract: In two experiments, we assessed evaluative priming effects in a task that was unrelated to the congruent or incongruent stimulus pairs. In each trial, participants saw two valent (positive or negative) pictures that formed evaluatively congruent or incongruent stimulus pairs and a letter that was superimposed on the second picture. Different from typical evaluative priming studies, participants were not required to respond to the second of the valent stimuli, but asked to categorize the letter that was superimposed on the second picture. We assessed the impact of the evaluative (in)congruency of the two pictures on the performance in responding to the letter. In addition, we manipulated attention to the evaluative dimension by asking participants in one experimental group to respond to the valence of the pictures on a subset of trials (evaluative task condition). In both experiments, we found evaluative priming effects in letter categorization responses: Participants categorized the letter faster (and sometimes more correctly) in trials with congruent picture-pairs. These effects were present only in the evaluative task condition. These findings can be explained with different resource-based accounts of evaluative priming and the additional assumption that attention to valence is necessary for evaluative congruency to affect processing resources. According to resource-based accounts valence-incongruent trials require more cognitive resources than valence-congruent trials (e.g., Hermans, Van den Broeck, & Eelen, 1998).
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, <location>Belgium</location> Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, <location>Germany</location>
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gast
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, <location>Germany</location>
authors.forename: Benedikt
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Werner
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, <location>Germany</location> Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, <location>Germany</location>
authors.forename: Christina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Heitmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Clinical and Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, <location>Belgium</location>
authors.forename: Adriaan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Spruyt
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, <location>Germany</location>
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Rothermund
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: affective priming; affective processing; affective-motivational account; attention; attitudes; cognitive resources; evaluative; evaluative priming; feature-specific attention allocation