Effects of subliminal affective priming on occupational gender stereotypes

We investigated the effects of subliminal affective priming on implicit and explicit occupational gender stereotypes and their correspondence. First, we manipulated 3 types of affective priming (positive, neutral, and negative) and utilized the Implicit Association Test to find that positively affective priming decreased, and negatively affective priming increased, implicit occupational gender stereotyping at the subliminal level. We then measured participants' explicit occupational gender stereotypes and found that, at the subliminal level, positive affective priming deterred, and negative affective priming enhanced, explicit occupational gender stereotypes. Also, in the condition of subliminal affective priming, implicit and explicit occupational gender stereotypes were not significantly related and affect did not moderate the correspondence between them. In sum, our results showed that affect moderated both implicit and explicit occupational gender stereotypes in the condition of subliminal affective priming, but did not moderate the correspondence between them.

The Direction of Affective Priming as a Function of Trait Anxiety When Naming Target Words With Regular and Irregular Pronunciation

Results from an affective priming experiment confirm the previously reported influence of trait anxiety on the direction of affective priming in the naming task ( Maier, Berner, & Pekrun, 2003 ): On trials in which extremely valenced primes appeared, positive affective priming reversed into negative affective priming with increasing levels of trait anxiety. Using valenced target words with irregular pronunciation did not have the expected effect of increasing the extent to which semantic processes play a role in naming, as affective priming effects were not stronger for irregular targets than for regular targets. This suggests the predominant operation of a whole-word nonsemantic pathway in reading aloud in German. Data from neutral priming trials hint at the possibility that negative affective priming in participants high in trait anxiety is due to inhibition of congruent targets.