Does sunshine prime loyal? Affective priming in the naming task

Abstract

Recent work has found an affective priming effect using the naming task: In pronouncing target words, pronunciation latencies were consistently shorter when the target (e.g., loyal) was preceded by an evaluatively congruent (e.g., sunshine) rather than incongruent prime word (e.g, rain). Using the naming task, no affective priming was found in the present studies irrespective of prime-set size and target-set size (Experiment 1), irrespective of stimulus-onset asynchrony (Experiment 2), and even when a nearly exact replication of previous work that demonstrated the effect was conducted (Experiment 3). Finally, bilingual German/English speakers exhibited strong associative priming, but no affective priming, in both the English as well as the German language (Experiment 4). The results show that priming for evaluatively related words is not a general finding.