Abstract
Numerous studies suggest that processing verbal materials containing negations slows down cognition and makes it more error-prone. This suggests that processing negations affords relatively nonautomatic processes. The present research studied the role of two automaticity features (processing speed and resource dependency) for negation processing. In three experiments, we tested the impact of verbal negations on affective priming effects in the Affect Misattribution Paradigm. Going beyond previous work, the results indicate that negations can be processed unintentionally and quickly (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 3, negations failed to qualify affective priming effects when participants’ working memory was taxed by memorizing an eight-digit number. In sum, the experiments suggest that negations can be processed unintentionally, very quickly, but that they rely on working-memory resources.
References
(1994). The four horsemen of automaticity: Awareness, intention, efficiency, and control in social cognition. In , Handbook of social cognition, Vol. 1, (pp. 1–40). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
(1969). The Pollyanna hypothesis. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 1–8.
(1974). Perceptual coding strategies in the formation and verification of descriptions. Memory and Cognition, 2, 101–111.
(1977). Psychology and language: An introduction to psycholinguistics. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic.
(2005). Separating multiple processes in implicit social cognition: The quad model of implicit task performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 469.
(2005). Further evidence for the role of mode-independent short-term associations in spatial Simon effects. Perception & Psychophysics, 67, 659–666.
(2002). Affective priming of semantic categorisation responses. Cognition and Emotion, 16, 643–666.
(2009). When the method makes a difference: Antagonistic effects on “automatic evaluations” as a function of task characteristics of the measure. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 101–114.
(2006). At the boundaries of automaticity: Negation as reflective operation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 385–405.
(1997). Analytic limitations of unconscious language processing. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 58, 3331.
(1996). Meta-analysis of experiments with matched groups or repeated measures designs. Psychological Methods, 1, 170–177.
(1972). Reasoning with negatives. British Journal of Psychology, 63, 213–219.
(1995). Variability in automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bona fide pipeline? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1013–1027.
(2003). Implicit measures in social cognition research: Their meaning and uses. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297–327.
(2005). Accessibility effects on implicit social cognition: The role of knowledge activation and retrieval experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 672.
(2008a). Attentional influences on affective priming: Does categorization (always) influence spontaneous evaluations of multiply categorizable objects? Manuscript submitted for publication.
(2008b). Response interference as a mechanism underlying implicit measures: Some traps and gaps in the assessment of mental associations with experimental paradigms. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 24, 218–228.
(2008c). When “Just Say No” is not enough: Affirmation versus negation training and the reduction of automatic stereotype activation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 370–377.
(2005). Contextual influences on implicit evaluation: A test of additive versus contrastive effects of evaluative context stimuli in affective priming. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1226–1236.
(1990). Unbelieving the unbelievable: Some problems in the rejection of false information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 601–613.
(2005). Believe it or not: On the possibility of suspending belief. Psychological Science, 16, 566–571.
(2000). Automatic attitude activation and efficiency: The fourth horseman of automaticity. Psychologica Belgica, 40, 3–22.
(2004). The influence of negation on product evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 583–591.
(2003). Effects of negation and situational presence on the accessibility of text information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 439–446.
(2002). Goal-dependent and goal-independent effects of irrelevant evaluations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 802–814.
(2007). Controllability and resource dependence in automatic evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 648–655.
(2000). Mechanisms of unconscious priming: I. Response competition, not spreading activation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 411–455.
(2003). Conscious control over the content of unconscious cognition. Cognition, 88, 223–242.
(1988). Toward an instance theory of automatization. Psychological Review, 95, 492–527.
(2004). “I am not guilty” vs. “I am innocent”: Successful negation may depend on the schema used for its encoding. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 433–449.
(2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167–202.
(2006). Automaticity: A theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 297–326.
(2005). Unintentional processing of motivational valence. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology, 6, 1043–1063.
(2003). Relations between implicit measures of prejudice: What are we measuring? Psychological Science, 14, 636–639.
(2005). An inkblot for attitudes: Affect misattribution as implicit measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 277–293.
(2004). Loading working memory enhances affective priming? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 326–331.
(2006). Pay attention! Attention to the primes increases attitude assessment accuracy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 784–791.
(2004). Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 220–247.
(2008). Why positive information is processed faster: The density hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 36–49.
(1967). Effectiveness of debriefing following deception experiments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6, 371–380.
(1999). Activation and inhibition of affective information: Evidence for negative priming in the evaluation task. Cognition and Emotion, 13, 65–91.
(2007). Implicit measures of attitudes. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
