Biomedical subjects

Agnes Moors

Publications and source records attributed to Agnes Moors.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis.

Several theoretical views of automaticity are discussed. Most of these suggest that automaticity should be diagnosed by looking at the presence of features such as unintentional, uncontrolled/uncontrollable, goal independent, autonomous, purely stimulus driven, unconscious, efficient, and fast. Contemporary views further suggest that these features should be investigated separately. The authors examine whether features of automaticity can be disentangled on a conceptual level, because only then is the separate investigation of them worth the effort. They conclude that the conceptual analysis of features is to a large extent feasible. Not all researchers agree with this position, however. The authors show that assumptions of overlap among features are determined by the other researchers' views of automaticity and by the models they endorse for information processing in general.

Automatism↗

PubMed2005

Automatic processing of dominance and submissiveness.

We investigated whether people are able to detect in a relatively automatic manner the dominant or submissive status of persons engaged in social interactions. We used a nonaffective variant of the affective Simon paradigm of De Houwer and Eelen (1998) in which participants responded by saying either "dominant" or "submissive" depending on the right or left spatial position of a target person who was engaged as either the dominant or the submissive agent in a social interaction. We observed that responses were facilitated when the status connotation of the target person and the correct response corresponded. These results provide new information about the automatic nature of information related to emotion-antecedent appraisals.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2005

Unintentional processing of motivational valence.

Recent motivational affective priming studies (Moors & De Houwer, 2001; Moors, De Houwer, & Eelen, 2004) showed that primes that indicate success on a goal-inducing task facilitate positive target responses whereas primes that indicate failure on that task facilitate negative target responses. In the current studies, we examined whether these priming effects depend on consciously intentional processing of the motivational valence of the primes. In Experiment 1, the outcome of success or failure was presented not only immediately before the target (i.e., the prime) but also a second time after the target response. This should encourage participants to ignore the prime. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to respond to the targets within 600 ms after target onset. As a result, participants had little opportunity to process the motivational prime valence in a consciously intentional way. Nevertheless, strong affective priming effects were found in both studies. These results provide additional support for the claim that motivational valence can be processed without the conscious intention to do so.

Adult↗