On The Nature of the Affective Priming Effect: Affective Priming of Naming Responses

Abstract

Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond and Hymes (1996) showed that participants need less time to name a target word if that target word is preceded by a prime word with the same valence compared to when that target word is preceded by a prime word with a different valence. However, recent studies raise serious doubts about the robustness and the reliability of the affective priming effect in the word-word naming task. We report three affective priming studies in which the modality of the primes and the targets was manipulated (words vs. pictures). Results show that replicable affective priming of naming responses can be obtained when pictures are used as primes but not when words are used as primes. These findings are interpreted in light of the hypothesis that the primes influence the identity encoding of the targets.