Affective priming with liked and disliked persons: Prime visibility determines congruency and incongruency effects

The present research investigated whether the affective priming paradigm fr om Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986) can be used as an implicit measure of person schemata. Names and faces of friends or romantic partner s and of a disliked person were used as primes. It was explored whether: (1 ) stimuli relating to liked and disliked persons elicit congruency priming effects similar to those reported for words; (2) masked and unmasked primin g procedures had similar effects; and (3) whether individual differences in the implicit measure were related to explicit measures of relationship qua lity. For clearly visible primes the expected congruence priming effects we re found across names and faces. For marginally visible primes, however, un expected reverse priming effects were observed for the disliked person. In a second experiment, a confound of the familiarity and evaluation of the si gnificant other primes was removed. Now a reverse priming effect could be d emonstrated for masked primes in both liked and disliked person conditions. On the group level, effects were consistent across name and face primes, t hus providing strong evidence that priming effects were caused by the activ ation of person schemata. The reliability of inter-individual differences i n person-specific priming effects was found to be unsatisfactory, and corre lations with explicit measures were not consistent across name and face pri ming conditions. An explanation of reverse priming effects is discussed, an d measures to improve the psychometric quality of individual affective prim ing indices are suggested.