The Automatic Evaluation of Pictures

Previous research (Hermans, de Houwer, & Eelen, 1994) has found that in a priming paradigm, pictures of extremely evaluated objects speed the evaluation of same-valence targets when presented for a very short interval beforehand, showing that such pictures are automatically evaluated. This research extended the generality of the automatic evaluation effect among pictures by including less extreme pictures as prime stimuli, and by reducing explicitly evaluative aspects of the experimental paradigms. In the first experiment, pictures influenced evaluation latencies as predicted, but extremely evaluated pictures were more likely to do so. A second experiment found that more and less extreme pictures showed comparable automatic evaluation without an explicit evaluation goal. These experiments indicate that everyday objects can be immediately and implicitly evaluated on sight.