Contingency awareness and evaluative conditioning: when will it be enough?
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Attitude↗
Biomedical subjects
J De Houwer
Publications and source records attributed to J De Houwer.
Associative learning of likes and dislikes: a review of 25 years of research on human evaluative conditioning.
Evaluative conditioning refers to changes in the liking of a stimulus that are due to the fact that the stimulus has been paired with other, positive or negative stimuli. Although evaluative conditioning appears to be subjected to certain boundary conditions, significant evaluative conditioning effects have been obtained using a large variety of stimuli and procedures. Some data suggest that evaluative conditioning can occur under conditions that do not support other forms of Pavlovian conditioning, and several models have been proposed to account for these differences. In the present article, the authors summarize the available literature, draw conclusions where possible, and provide suggestions for future research.
Association Learning↗
Stimulus-feature specific negative priming.
We report the results of two experiments that showed that the time needed to respond to a feature of a stimulus increases when that particular feature of that particular stimulus previously had to be ignored. The data of Experiment 2 argue against the hypothesis that the observed stimulus-feature specific negative priming was due to a response conflict instigated by automatic episodic retrieval of prime responses. Experiment 2 also showed that the effects were not caused by difficulties in switching between prime and probe tasks and provided additional evidence for the fact that priming effects were stimulus-feature specific. The present results suggest that the selective inhibition or episodic encoding mechanisms that are assumed to underlie negative priming can operate in a more specific and powerful manner than has been previously assumed.
Adult↗
Evaluative conditioning in the picture-picture paradigm with random assignment of conditioned stimuli to unconditioned stimuli.
Human participants were allocated to 1 of 3 groups. In the conditioning group, each conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (US) pair was presented 7 times during the acquisition phase. Participants who were assigned to the extinction group saw 5 additional presentations of each CS in isolation after the 7 presentations of each CS-US pair. In the latent inhibition group, the CS-only trials were presented before the CS-US trials. Overall, a significant evaluative conditioning effect was observed. This effect cannot be dismissed on the basis of the arguments developed by A. P. Field and G. C. L. Davey (1997, 1998, 1999), and the results thus provide strong evidence for the associative nature of evaluative conditioning. The results are also in line with other findings, which showed that evaluative conditioning is resistant to extinction.
Conditioning, Classical↗
Affective Simon effects using facial expressions as affective stimuli.
Two experiments are reported in which facial expressions were presented and participants were asked to respond with the word POSITIVE or NEGATIVE on the basis of a relevant feature of the facial stimuli while ignoring the valence of the expression. Results showed that reaction times were influenced by the match between the valence of the facial expression and the valence of the correct response when the identity of the presented person had to be determined in order to select the correct response, but not when the gender of the presented person was relevant. The present experiments illustrate the flexibility of the affective Simon paradigm and provide a further demonstration of the generalizability of the affective Simon effect.
Adult↗
Differences in intentional retrieval during inclusion and exclusion tasks.
The process dissociation approach assumes that intentional retrieval processes operate in the same manner during inclusion and exclusion tasks. The present research shows that this assumption is not always tenable. After completing a word stem according to inclusion or exclusion instructions, subjects were asked whether they had recalled a word presented during study while completing the stem. Stem completion latencies were also recorded. When the exclusion task was described as a creativity test (Experiment 2), subjects recalled almost twice as many words during inclusion than during exclusion trials. Also, completion latencies were longer on inclusion trials, suggesting that on these trials subjects tried hard to remember old words. When instructions stressed that recall of old words was as important on exclusion as on inclusion trials (Experiment 1), recall rates did not differ significantly between both kinds of trials. However, completion latencies were significantly longer on inclusion trials, showing that, despite instructions, subjects still invested more effort in trying to remember old words during inclusion trials. The implications of these findings for future process dissociation research are discussed.
Adult↗
Observational conditioning of food valence in humans.
It has been suggested that the observation of a model consuming a food (CS) and facially expressing either to like or to dislike (US') the food, may be a sufficient condition to bring about a change in the valence of the food for the observer. Unfortunately, up to now this hypothesis has not been investigated in a straightforward manner. In this study, during acquisition, children consumed a series of evaluatively neutral colored and flavored drinks, while simultaneously they watched a videotaped model synchronically drinking identical drinks and facially expressing his evaluation (neutral or dislike) of the liquids. In one condition, the presence of a particular flavor in the drinks was designated to function as the CS+ or the CS-, whereas in the other condition it was the color of the drinks which was the critical CS+ or CS-. Next, the children evaluated a series of drinks containing the critical CSs. A clear evaluative learning effect was obtained when the flavor but not when the color of the drinks was systematically paired with the model's facial expression of dislike. Moreover, the flavor conditioning effect was dependent on the presence in the test drinks of the local context cues (c.q. the colors of the drinks) which were used during acquisition. Finally a double dissociation was observed between explicit beliefs and the "evaluative knowledge" expressed in the ratings of the drinks, in that none of the children in the CS = Flavor groups evidenced any explicit knowledge about the crucial CS-US' contingency but showed evaluative conditioning, whereas the majority of the children in CS = Color groups were aware of the CS-US' relation but failed to demonstrate an evaluative CS-/CS-differentiation.
Attitude↗
Evaluative conditioning is a qualitatively distinct form of classical conditioning: a reply to Davey (1994).
Based on a critical review of the literature, Davey (1994) [Behaviour Research and Therapy, 32, 291-299] concludes that there is no sufficient evidence to support the theoretical position that evaluative conditioning is a qualitatively different form of classical conditioning. In the present manuscript, we will try to show that Davey's conclusion is biased by: (a) an overemphasis on what he believes to be problematic procedural aspects of previous evaluative conditioning studies; and (b) a selective reading of the available evidence. Finally, an attempt is made to characterize evaluative conditioning phenomena as the output of a Referential Learning System, which can be distinguished from an Expectancy Learning System.
Association Learning↗
Comparing color-word and picture-word Stroop-like effects: a test of the Glaser and Glaser (1989) model.
Glaser and Glaser (1989) assume that the processing of colors and pictures is highly similar in that, compared to words, both kinds of stimulis have privileged access to semantic information. This assumption was tested in the present research. In Experiment 1, the season corresponding to the color or to the word of color-word Stroop stimuli had to be named (e.g., green for spring). In Experiment 2, subjects had to name the season corresponding to the picture or the word of a picture-word stimulus (e.g., flower for spring). According to Glaser and Glaser (1989), privileged semantic processing of colors and pictures should be evidenced by a larger interfering power of color and picture distractors than of word distractors. However, the asymmetric pattern of interference was observed only with picture-word stimuli (Experiment 2), but not with color-word stimuli (Experiment 1), suggesting that, unlike pictures, colors do not have privileged access to semantic information. It was also found that word distractors interfered with the semantic processing of pictures, a result that is incompatible with the dominance rule postulated by Glaser and Glaser (1989). From these results, an adapted version of the Glaser and Glaser model is proposed: colors are assumed to have privileged access to a separate color-processing system and the pattern of interference depends upon the relative activation strength of the response alternatives activated by the target and the distractor.
Adult↗
Verbal evaluative conditioning with undetected US presentations.
In evaluative conditioning research it has been shown that a neutral stimulus (CS) acquires the valence of a positive or negative stimulus (US) with which it is presented contingently. An experiment is reported in which it is examined whether evaluative shifts can also be observed in the complete absence of contingency-awareness. Neutral words were either followed by a briefly presented positive or negative word. Results showed that neutral words which were presented contingently with a positive word, were afterwards liked more than words which were paired with negative words. This result was obtained despite the fact that Ss were not aware of the presentation of the briefly presented USs.
Adult↗
Evaluative decision latencies mediated by induced affective states.
Recent priming studies (e.g. Hermans, De Houwer & Eelen, 1994, Cognition and Emotion, 8, 515-533) have demonstrated that response latencies to target stimuli are mediated by the affective relation between prime and target. The time needed to evaluate or pronounce targets is facilitated if preceded by similarly valenced primes, but is inhibited for trials on which prime and target have an opposite affective valence. These data suggest that information stored in memory is associatively linked with similarly evaluated information, through association with some general representation of goodness or badness. To investigate whether affective priming is merely one type of conventional semantic priming, or whether it is mediated by affective responses, the affective context provided by the primes was replaced in this study by the induction of an emotional state using a Musical Mood Induction procedure (Depression/Elation). Subjects had to evaluate target pictures as quickly as possible. The data revealed a significant Mood Change (More Depressed/Less Depressed/No Change) x Target Valence (Positive/Negative) interaction, indicating that emotional states can mediate evaluate response latencies to affectively valenced target stimuli. The results are interpreted in the context of a biphasic emotion theory, and are related to previous research on mood congruency effects on perceptual responses.
Adult↗