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The Additive Effect of Misattribution: Affective or Semantic?
2014, 37(3):
694-699.
Misattribution is conceptualized as mistaking an effect of one source for the effect of another (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). It was not only a common phenomenon in people’s daily life, Payne et, al. (2005) also developed a paradigm of Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and found that the affect aroused by the prime was misattributed to a neutral target. However, there is usually more than one prime of misattribution in real life. Based on the previous studies that nonconscious affect deriving from independent primes had combined effects (Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc, 1995), the present study adopted a modified AMP paradigm to investigate whether the additive effect of misattribution was induced by two sequentially presented affective primes. Furthermore, recent AMP studies indicated that semantic misattribution also took place (e.g. Blaison, Imhoff, Hühnel, Hess, & Banse, 2012; Jones, Fazio, & Olson, 2009; Sava et al., 2012). Thus, this study used semantic priming as a contrast condition, to further exam whether the additive effect of semantic misattribution was also found.
Three experiments were conducted in the present study, using the Chinese pictographs as affective or semantic primes and the Hebrew words as targets. A total of 21 undergraduate students (11 males and 9 females) without any Hebrew learning experiences participated in experiment 1 and experiment 3a, which adopted the standard AMP procedure; they were seated in front of a Pentium Ⅲ 800 computer and they were presented with the Hebrew character as a target immediately after the presentation of the Chinese pictograph as a prime, their task was to indicate whether the target word depicted a positive / negative (experiment 1) or animate / inanimate (experiment 3a) object. Participants in experiment 2 and experiment 3b were 23 undergraduate students without any Hebrew learning experiences (9 males and 14 females), who took part in the modified AMP paradigm of two sequentially present primes; they were presented with a neutral target, which was preceded by context stimuli (the first Chinese pictograph) and prime stimuli (the second Chinese pictograph) varying in terms of valence or semantic attribute, their job was to judge whether they perceived the target word to be pleasant / unpleasant or animate / inanimate respectively. In addition, all of the participants were instructed to respond quickly.
The main results (see Fig. 2) were summarized as follows: (1) In the experiment 1 and experiment 3a, there were clear main effects of prime valance [F(1, 20)=26.58, p<.001, η2=1] and semantic attribute [F(1, 20)=51.79, p<.01, η2=1], which implied there were significant misattribution effects under both affective and semantic priming conditions in the standard AMP paradigm. (2) Experiment 2 revealed a main effect of the second prime valance [F(1, 22)=8.98, p<.01, η2=.82] and a significant two-way interaction between first prime valence and second prime valence [F(1, 22)=6.45,p<.05,η2=.68], indicating that the affective misattribution effect of the second prime was more pronounced when the valance of first prime was consistent with the second prime than when the valance of two primes were inconsistent, that is, the valence of the first prime and the valence of the second prime had an additive effect of misattribution. (3) Experiment 3b showed that, as a contrast condition, there were no misattribution effects in the modified AMP experiment by using two semantic primes.
Base on the results of this study, the additive effect of misattribution only took place in sequentially affective rather than semantic priming. The affect aroused by the primes that was misattributed to the targets in the modified AMP presumably followed an additive function, resulting in accentuated affect for evaluatively congruent primes and reduced affect for evaluatively incongruent primes.
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