In an experiment designed to demonstrate evaluative conditioning, subjects were shown 48 pictures of sculptures that they rated on a scale with 21 categories (-10 to +10). Then, the two most liked pictures (L) were paired with pictures from the categories -1, 0, or +1 (N). In contrast to prior experiments, subjects were given either forward conditioning (N-L) or backward conditioning (L-N) tria...

It has previously been argued (a) that automatic evaluative stimulus processing is critically dependent upon feature-specific attention allocation and (b) that evaluative priming effects can arise in the absence of dimensional overlap between the prime set and the response set. In line with both claims, research conducted at our lab revealed that the evaluative priming effect replicates in the ...

The co-occurrence of positive and negative attributes of an attitude object typically accounts for less than a quarter of the variance in felt ambivalence toward these objects, rendering this evaluative incongruence insufficient for explaining felt ambivalence. The present research tested whether another type of incongruence, semantic incongruence, also causes felt ambivalence. Semantic incongr...