A time course analysis of the affective priming effect

The argument that automatic processes are responsible for affective/evaluative effects has been primarily based on studies that have manipulated the onset asynchrony (SOA; i.e., the interval between the onset of the prime the onset of the target). Moreover, these SOA studies provide an insight in the course of the activation processes underlying automatic affect/attitude activation. on a fine-grained manipulation of the SOA employing either the decision task (Experiment 1) and the pronunciation task (Experiment 2) concluded that affective priming, and hence automatic affect activation, is on fast-acting automatic processes. The results of Experiment 3 provide a explanation for an apparent discrepancy between the results of Experiments 1 2 and previous findings. Finally, the results of Experiment 3 support the of Jarvis and Petty (1996) that affective priming effects should be for participants who are more chronically engaged in conscious evaluations.