Under what conditions can human affective conditioning occur without contingency awareness? Test of the evaluative conditioning paradigm

The role of conscious cognitive processes in human affective conditioning remains controversial, with several theories arguing that such conditioning can occur without awareness of the conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingency. One specific type of affective conditioning in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEmotion (Washington, D.C.) Vol. 7; no. 4; p. 755
Main Authors Dawson, Michael E, Rissling, Anthony J, Schell, Anne M, Wilcox, Rand
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.11.2007
Subjects
Affect
Awareness
Blinking
Conditioning, Classical
Galvanic Skin Response - physiology
Humans
Reaction Time
Reflex, Startle
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Summary:The role of conscious cognitive processes in human affective conditioning remains controversial, with several theories arguing that such conditioning can occur without awareness of the conditioned stimulus (CS)-unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingency. One specific type of affective conditioning in which unaware conditioning is said to occur is "evaluative conditioning." The present experiment tested the role of contingency awareness by embedding an evaluative conditioning paradigm in a distracting masking task while obtaining, in addition to subjective ratings of affect, both psychophysiological (skin conductance and startle eyeblink) and indirect behavioral (affective priming) measures of conditioning, along with a trial-by-trial measure of awareness from 55 college student participants. Aware participants showed conditioning with all of the measures; unaware participants failed to show conditioning with all measures. The behavioral, neurophysiological, and therapeutic implications of these findings are discussed.
ISSN:1528-3542
DOI:10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.755