10.1177/0146167203258855 ARTICLEPERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETINStorbeck, Robinson / SEM NTIC AND AFFECTIVE PR MING 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 rele-vant targets. The authors orthogonally varied both the semantic and affective relations between primes and targets. In both stud-ies, 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 cate-gory. Studies 4 and 5 used pictures rather than words to examine automatic encoding tendencies. The results conceptually repli-cated 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