The Psychology of Evaluation

Affective Processes in Cognition and Emotion

Jochen Musch, Karl C. Klauer, Jochen Musch, Karl C. Klauer

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135640583
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

The affective connotations of environmental stimuli are evaluated spontaneously and with minimal cognitive processing. The activated evaluations influence subsequent emotional and cognitive processes. Featuring original contributions from leading researchers active in this area, this book reviews and integrates the most recent research and theories on this exciting new topic. Many fundamental issues regarding the nature of and relationship between evaluations, cognition, and emotion are covered. The chapters explore the mechanisms and boundary conditions of automatic evaluative processes, the determinants of valence, indirect measures of individual differences in the evaluation of social stimuli, and the relationship between evaluations and mood, as well as emotion and behavior. Offering a highly integrated and comprehensive coverage of the field, this book is suitable as a core textbook in advanced courses dealing with the role of evaluations in cognition and emotion.

Chapter 1
The Psychology of Evaluation: An Introduction

Jochen Musch
Karl Christoph Klauer
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

Evaluative and affective information processing in individuals has long been a fundamental issue in social and cognitive psychology. The concepts affect, valence, and attitude are all fundamentally linked to the most basic psychological dimensions of good versus bad, positive versus negative, approach versus avoidance. The processing of stimulus valence, that is, the act of determining the location of a stimulus on the affective dimension, is at the heart of most current theories in cognition and emotion. Accordingly, there has been a dramatic increase in interest in evaluative processes in the late 20th century. Research on the nature of evaluative processes is now one of the most rapidly growing endeavours of psychology and provides a unifying focus for researchers working in a variety of disciplines such as social, cognitive, and personality psychology.

Of particular interest has been the question whether evaluations are elicited automatically, without intent, effort, and conscious awareness, and how these evaluations influence subsequent information processing. Much of this research has been conducted in the framework of the affective priming paradigm and has sought to identify conditions under which evaluations are processed automatically. Another major concern has been the consequences of the activated evaluations on the perceiver’s judgments and behaviors. In addition, theoretical progress has revealed a number of surprising parallels and connections between affective priming and other paradigms such as evaluative conditioning, Stroop-analogous tasks, the Simon task, and the mere exposure paradigm, to name just a few. Finally, these in-sights have been used to develop unobtrusive measures of implicit attitudes such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and other tasks based on the affective priming paradigm, Out of this work, a common theoretical foundation for evaluative information processing is beginning to emerge. The present book seeks to provide an informative, scholarly, yet readable overview of what we know today about the nature of evaluation and affective processes in cognition and emotion. It summarizes all recent advances in the field, based on invited contributions from an eminent group of investigators.

However, this is not simply an edited book in the usual sense. Rather, it is the result of an ongoing discussion between a number of researchers united by a joint and continued interest in the psychology of evaluation. Accordingly, the idea for this book evolved in a number of interconnected forums and is the result of extensive and fruitful theoretical exchanges that took place on various occasions. In particular, from 1994 to 2000, several research projects within the research program “Information processing in its social context”, which was initiated by Klaus Fiedler and Fritz Strack and implemented by the German Research Foundation DFG, dealt with affective and emotional processes. In June 1997, many of the contributors to the present volume met in Konstanz at a symposium on affective priming hosted by the social psychology division of the German Psychological Society. In 1998, a special issue of the German Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie was devoted to affective priming. In December 1998, Jan De Houwer and Dirk Hermans organized a workshop on affective processing in Leuven, as a part of the Scientific Research Network “Acquisition and representation of evaluative judgments and emotions”. In June 1999, a symposium on affective priming took place in Kassel at the occasion of the biannual meeting of the German social psychologists. Finally, in March 2001, a special issue of Cognition and Emotion dealt with the psychology of evaluation, and in May 2001, another workshop supported by the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders, Belgium) was being held in Le Lignely.

The book is organised into four main sections. The first section deals with the mechanisms, boundary conditions, and theories of automatic evaluation processes. In a comprehensive review of findings obtained in the affective priming paradigm, Klauer and Musch examine the evidence for different mechanisms that have been proposed to underlie automatic evaluation effects. Their review is structured around the impacts of the major procedural variables: Prime variables, target variables, variables related to the prime-target pairs, list-context variables, and task-related variables. Major explanations of affective priming effects and their respective empirical support are explored. The chapter concludes with a model of the evaluative system that comprises a process of automatic evaluation activation and two mechanisms, assumed to operate in parallel, that mediate the effects of activated evaluations on subsequent evaluative and nonevaluative processing.

In chapter 3, Wentura and Rothermund discuss consequences of the automatic processing of valence that go beyond temporarily increasing the accessibility of associated concepts. Because of its global relevance, they argue, the automatic processing of valence is strongly tied to response processes and is therefore likely to interrupt ongoing behavior by modifying the probability of responses and redirecting behavior. Wentura and Rothermund make a strong case for this power of positive and negative stimuli to meddle with ongoing processes of behavior formation, and present a theoretical framework in which this meddling-in of valent stimuli is seen as the common ground to several automatic evaluation phenomena, including affective priming, Simon, and Stroop effects.

In chapter 4, dealing with boundary conditions of automatic evaluation processes, Glaser suggests that the automatic evaluative response is more complex than a simple binary orientation. Specifically, he argues that automatic evaluative responses can be automatically overridden when the priming stimulus is obtrusive and when accuracy motivation is high. Such findings have implications for the important debate on the conditionality of automatic evaluation. Glaser suggests that positions holding that automatic evaluation will occur only for those stimuli toward which a reasonably strong attitude is held, and positions holding that automatic evaluation is unconditional and will occur with equal facility for strong and weak attitude objects, may represent a false dichotomy. According to Glaser, all stimuli can elicit an automatic evaluative response, but the strength of the attitude will moderate the magnitude of the response.

In a thought-provoking chapter that concludes the more theoretically oriented first section of the book (chapter 5), Fiedler points to hidden vicissitudes of the priming paradigm in evaluative judgment research in a review that integrates findings from different priming paradigms ranging from simple perception and word-recognition experiments to more complex measures of decision making, manifest action, and goal orientation. Fiedler outlines an enriched framework for studying priming effects on evaluative judgments. Within this framework, he argues for the separation of the evaluative judgment domain from the original paradigm of priming in associative memory and highlights the distinction between afferent and efferent process components.

The second section of the book investigates how evaluations are acquired and how evaluative judgments are arrived at. Hermans, Baeyens, and Eelen (chapter 6) highlight parallels between evaluative learning and affective priming research and demonstrate the relevance of the study of evaluative conditioning for a better understanding of the processes that are involved in the cycle that encompasses the acquisition, the representation, and the activation of evaluative information in memory. In particular, they show that associative acquisition procedures are capable of inducing evaluative changes that can be assessed by indirect measures of stimulus valence such as the IAT and the affective priming procedure.

Ferguson and Bargh (chapter 7) argue against the assumption that an evaluation consists of a single, affective representation associated in memory with the object. Studies showing that participants are able to automatically evaluate novel, unfamiliar objects for which there are no previously stored, corresponding representations, are consistent with the claim that an evaluation represents a combination of numerous evaluations of various features of the object. In addition, these studies suggest that automatic evaluations can be spontaneously and immediately constructed on the spot, rather than being dependent on previous experience with, and conscious appraisal of, the objects.

Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, and Reber (chapter 8) propose that one particular source of relevant information for the assessment of valence is the fluency with which information about the target can be processed. They propose that high fluency is associated with more favorable evaluations and present empirical evidence consistent with their proposal. Subsequently, they explore possible reasons for the link between fluency and affective reactions and discuss boundary conditions of the fluency-affect link.

The third section of the book considers indirect measures of individual differences in the evaluation of social objects. In his structural analysis of different indirect measures, De Houwer (chapter 9) focuses on four reaction time tasks that provide potential ways to measure attitudes indirectly: affective priming tasks, the emotional Stroop task, the Implicit Association Test, and the affective Simon task. De Houwer presents a taxonomy of these indirect measures of attitudes that reveals the essential similarities and differences between them, as well as their relation to existing compatibility tasks. He concludes by discussing the implications of this structural analysis for the measurement of attitudes.

In chapter 10, Banse presents the results of his research on unobtrusive measures of relationship quality. In an overview of experimental methods that have been used in relationship research, it is shown how attachment theories can be tested using indirect measures based on implicit associations and automatic evaluations that are not distorted by self-presentation concerns. However, problems and limitations of the priming approach to the investigation of the mental representation of relationships are also considered.

Robinson, Vargas, and Crawford (chapter 11) explore individual differences in evaluative processing. These differences in, for example, the speed to recognize rewards or threats have the potential to influence emotional behavior and experience. The authors therefore recommend to supplement self-report measures of personality traits by evaluative processing paradigms in order to develop a more complete understanding of how and why people differ in their emotional reactions. An agenda is set for future evaluative processing research in which individual differences play a central role.

The relationship between evaluations on one hand and mood, emotion and behavior on the other hand is explored in the fourth section of the book. Niedenthal, Rohmann, and Dalle (chapter 12) review the research on the automatic activation of evaluative responses and emotional states and discuss the theoretical distinction between evaluations and emotional responses. They report experimental evidence suggesting that the experience of emotional feelings and the activation of emotion concepts do not have the same consequences for subsequent information processing. They argue that a powerful theory of conceptual representation and processing is required in order to understand the conditions under which the processing of emotional words and concepts will result in the reexperience of some affect.

Clore and Colcombe (chapter 13) discuss the mood-like effects that sometimes occur when evaluative concepts are unconsciously primed. They propose that moods and primed evaluative concepts have parallel effects, because affective feelings and affective meaning obey the same rules. Both, affective feelings engendered by mood states, as well as unconsciously primed affective meaning can exert broad influence, because the implied evaluation is not tied to a particular source. Moreover, they argue that the information from affective mood and the information from affective priming share an important phenomenological quality that make them both especially compelling: in the absence of a salient, external source, they are experienced as internally generated.

In the concluding chapter, Neumann, Förster, and Strack (chapter 14) discuss how emotions and attitudes serve adaptive functions in preparing individuals to act in accordance with their needs and the requirements of their environment. In their view, evaluative processes underlying emotions and attitudes are directly linked to motor representations of either approach or avoidance responses. Approach or avoidance behavior is facilitated whenever compatible evaluative contents are processed. This link between evaluation and behavioral dispositions seems to be bidirectional in nature, however, in the sense that the execution of approach or avoidance behavior facilitates compatible evaluative processes. From this perspective, approach and avoidance behavior is not only a consequence, but also a cause of evaluative processes.

I:
Mechanisms, Boundary Conditions, and Theories of Automatic Evaluation

Chapter 2
Affective Priming: Findings and Theories

Karl Christoph Klauer
Jochen Musch
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

Environmental events directly and automatically activate three interactive but distinct psychological systems, responsible, respectively, for perceptual, evaluative, and motivational analysis according to a model proposed by Bargh (1997). These systems’ automatic reactions to environmental events influence perceptual interpretations of other people’s behavior, they color the evaluations of perceived objects and persons, and they inhibit or energize behavioral responses. Automaticity of a social phenomenon is a powerful finding because it implies that a person is not in conscious control of the behavior or perception in question, cannot escape the automatic processing once it is elicited by appropriate trigger stimuli, and ultimately cannot be held fully responsible for the ensuing biases in perceptions, judgments, and behavior (Bargh, 1999; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).

Bargh (1997) distinguished preconscious from postconscious and goaldependent forms of automaticity. Preconscious effects require only the presence of the triggering environmental event. They do not depend on a prepared or receptively tuned cognitive state. In contrast, postconscious and goal-dependent effects require special mental states in addition to the mere presence of triggering objects or events. For example, goal-dependent automaticity is conditioned on the individual intending to perform the mental function, but given this intention, the processing occurs immediately and autonomously in the presence of the triggering stimulus (e.g., Pendry & Macrae, 1996).

The evaluative system comprises a process of automatic activation of evaluations that is triggered by the mere presence of an object in one’s field of perception. A major tenet is therefore that the process of evaluation activation is preconscious. A second postulate is that the evaluative system is functionally dissociable from the perceptual and the motivational system. The evidence for both assumptions stems in large part from the affective priming paradigm.

Affective priming refers to the phenomenon that processing of an evaluatively polarized target word (e.g., love) is facilitated, that is, proceeds faster and more accurately, when it is preceded by an evaluatively consistent prime word (e.g., sunshine) rather than an evaluatively inconsistent prime word (e.g., death). Since the seminal demonstrations by Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986), more than 80 studies have been conducted in that paradigm extending it in many ways and probing deeply into the dynamics and mechanisms of evaluative processing. An overview of the studies reviewed in this chapter is given in the appendix. Affective priming effects contrast evaluatively consistent and inconsistent prime-target pairs: They are defined by the interaction of prime and target valence. Both evaluatively consistent and inconsistent prime-target pairs comprise positive and negative words and thus, affective priming can be expected to provide a relatively pure measure of evaluative processing uncontaminated by nonevaluative differences between the sets of positive and negative stimuli in, for example, familiarity, informational diagnosticity, concreteness, and others. In recent years, the paradigm has also received attention as providing an unobtrusive measure for assessing evaluations (Banse, chap. 10, this volume; De Houwer, chap. 9, this volume; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Hermans, Baeyens, & Eelen, chap. 6, this volume; Hermans, Vansteenwegen, Crombez, Baeyens, & Eelen, in press; Otten & Wentura, 1999).

The present chapter is organized as follows. We begin with a review of findings obtained in the affective priming paradigm. The review is structured around the impacts of the major procedural variables: Prime variables, target variables, variables related to the prime-target pairs, list-context variables, and task-related variables. The next section introduces the major explanations of affective priming effects and explores their respective empirical support vis a vis the just-reviewed findings. The chapter concludes with a model of the evaluative system that comprises a process of automatic evaluation activation and two mechanisms, assumed to operate in parallel, that mediate the effects of activ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• CHAPTER 1: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVALUATION: AN INTRODUCTION
• I: MECHANISMS, BOUNDARY CONDITIONS, AND THEORIES OF AUTOMATIC EVALUATION
• II: EVALUATIVE JUDGMENTS AND THE ACQUISITION OF EVALUATIONS
• III: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND INDIRECT MEASURES OF EVALUATIONS
• IV: THE ROLE OF EVALUATION IN MOOD, EMOTION, AND BEHAVIOR