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When does contextual positivity influence judgments of familiarity? Investigating moderators of the positivity-familiarity effect

Weil, Rebecca; Palma, Tomás; Gawronski, Bertram

Authors

Rebecca Weil

Tomás Palma

Bertram Gawronski



Abstract

The positivity-familiarity effect suggests that people use positive affect as a cue to answer the question of whether they have encountered a stimulus before. Five experiments investigated this effect under various conditions. Positivity-familiarity effects were obtained irrespective of whether the task context suggested a correct answer to the question of whether a given target stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar. However, effects were less reliable when participants had a basis to assume that they had been presented with the target stimuli earlier in the same study and when they were asked to indicate whether the targets had been presented before (instead of judging them as familiar or unfamiliar). Positivity-familiarity effects were also obtained irrespective of whether affective primes were presented for short, moderate, or long durations. However, effects were less reliable for short compared to moderate and long prime presentations. Implications for the positivity-familiarity effect and other misattribution phenomena are discussed.

Citation

Weil, R., Palma, T., & Gawronski, B. (2020). When does contextual positivity influence judgments of familiarity? Investigating moderators of the positivity-familiarity effect. Social cognition : the official journal of the International Social Cognition Network, 38(2), 119-145. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2020.38.2.119

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 9, 2019
Publication Date 2020-04
Deposit Date Nov 17, 2019
Publicly Available Date Oct 31, 2020
Journal Social Cognition
Print ISSN 0278-016X
Electronic ISSN 0278-016X
Publisher Guilford Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 38
Issue 2
Pages 119-145
DOI https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2020.38.2.119
Keywords Affect; Analytic processing; Familiarity; Misattribution; Salience
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/2903792
Contract Date Nov 17, 2019

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© 2019 Copyright Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press






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