Preferences and inferences in encoding visual objects: a systematic comparison of semantic and affective priming.

The authors systematically compared semantic and affective priming in five studies involving words and pictures. In Studies 1 (lexical decision task) and 2 (evaluation task), irrelevant short duration (200 ms) primes were briefly flashed before relevant targets. The authors orthogonally varied both the semantic and affective relations between primes and targets. In both studies, semantic priming but not affective priming was found. Study 3 revealed that the same stimuli can produce affective priming, but only when words come from a single semantic category. Studies 4 and 5 used pictures rather than words to examine automatic encoding tendencies. The results conceptually replicated those from Studies 1 and 2. In sum, the findings suggest that affective priming may be a relatively fragile phenomenon, particularly when the semantic properties of objects vary in a salient manner.