Affective Priming for Associatively Unrelated Primes and Targets

Affective priming studies showed that responses to targets are faster when they are preceded by a prime with the same affective valence rather than the opposite valence. In virtually all these studies, primes were randomly assigned to different targets, the only restriction being that there should be a predetermined number of affectively congruent and incongruent pairs. One could, however, argue that on average, affectively congruent stimuli tend to be more associatively related than affectively incongruent stimuli. Therefore, randomly constructing affectively congruent and incongruent pairs does not rule out the possibility of a confound between the affective and associative relation between the primes and targets. We conducted a number of studies in which the prime-target pairs were normatively unassociated. Strong affective priming effects were observed in a series of three studies employing an evaluative categorisation task (Experiments 1 & 2), and a lexical decision task (Experiment 3).