UNCONSCIOUS PERCEPTION OF AFFECTIVE INFORMATION AND ITS IMPACT ON PERSONALITY-TRAIT JUDGMENT

This study investigated the facilitation and inhibition effects of sev eral types of valenced subliminal primes on the decision latencies of the positive or negative valence of different personality trait target s. The subjects' task was to decide, as quickly as possible, whether e ach of a series of traits (targets) connoted something positive or neg ative. Before the presentation of each target, a subliminal prime was briefly presented to the non-dominant eye. The prime was masked dichop tically by the simultaneous presentation of a mask to the dominant eye . Three kinds of primes were presented: personality traits (e.g., hone st); 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 anoth er 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 persona lity trait primes and non-trait primes, and (2) that no priming effect occurred for the compound prime condition.