Unconscious perception of affective information and its impact on personality trait judgment

This study investigated the facilitation and inhibition effects of several types of valenced subliminal primes on the decision latencies of the positive or negative valence of different personality trait targets. The subjects' task was to decide, as quickly as possible, whether each of a series of traits (targets) connoted something positive or negative. Before the presentation of each target, a subliminal prime was briefly presented to the non-dominant eye. The prime was masked dichoptically by the simultaneous presentation of a mask to the dominant eye. Three kinds of primes were presented: personality traits (e.g., honest); non-trait words (e.g., gift); and a compound prime made up of two words, a trait and a non-trait word evaluatively opposed to one another in polarization (e.g., sincere and disease). In line with Bower's (1981, 1991) affective network model of memory, the findings indicated (1) that subjects' decision speed of the evaluative target valence was influenced by the connoted content of apparently undetectable personality trait primes and non-trait primes, and (2) that no priming effect occurred for the compound prime condition.