Using facial expressions instead of response keys in the implicit association test.

Previous research found that when people are instructed to smile toward liked objects and show negative facial expressions toward disliked objects, their facial response is faster and more intense than when they are required to smile toward disliked objects and express negative facial response toward liked objects. The present research tested a technologically innovative indirect evaluation measure that was based on that finding. Participants completed an implicit association test (IAT)-a common indirect measure of evaluation, responding with their emotional facial expressions, rather than by pressing response keys. In two web studies, using emotional facial expression detection through a webcam, we found that the Facial Response IAT (FR-IAT) is a reliable and valid measure of evaluations, comparable to the keyboard IAT. Because facial responses provide more information than key responses, pursuing future improvements of the FR-IAT's methodology, software, and data analysis is a promising direction for enhancing the quality of indirect evaluation measurement. The same methodology and technology may also enhance other indirect measures of evaluation and cognitive tests related to emotion and judgment.

An Assimilative Effect of Stimulus Co-Occurrence on Evaluation Despite Contrasting Relational Information.

The co-occurrence of a neutral stimulus with affective stimuli typically causes the neutral stimulus's evaluation to shift toward the affective stimuli's valence. Does that assimilative effect occur even when one knows the co-occurrence is due to an opposition relation between the stimuli (e.g., Batman stops crime)? Previous evidence tentatively supported that possibility, based on results compatible with an assimilative effect obscured by a larger contrast effect of the opposition relation (e.g., people like Batman less than expected, perhaps due to his co-occurrence with crime). We report three experiments (N = 802) in which participants preferred stimuli that stopped positive events over stimuli that stopped negative events-an assimilative effect of co-occurrence, unobscured by a contrast effect, despite comprehending the opposition relation and its evaluative implications. Our findings suggest that the assimilative effect of co-occurrence is potentially ubiquitous, not limited only to co-occurrence due to relations that suggest valence similarity.

Evaluative Conditioning: Past, Present, and Future.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) research investigates changes in the evaluation of a stimulus after co-occurrence with an affective stimulus. To explain the motivation behind this research, this review begins with an overview of the history of EC research, followed by a summary of the state of the art with respect to three key questions. First, how should EC procedures be used to influence evaluation? We provide a guide based on evidence concerning the functional properties of EC effects. Second, how does the EC effect occur? We discuss the possible mediating cognitive processes and their automaticity. Third, are EC effects ubiquitous outside the lab? We discuss the evidence for the external validity of EC research. We conclude that the most important open questions pertain to the relevance of EC to everyday life and to the level of control that characterizes the processes that mediate the EC effect after people notice the stimulus co-occurrence.

The Relation Between Gender Identity and Well-Being.

Does strong gender identity help or harm one's well-being? Previous research suggests that acceptance of one's social group and feelings of belongingness to the group are positively related to well-being, regardless of the group's social status. However, there are inconsistent findings about the relation between well-being and how central the group is to one's identity (centrality), especially among disadvantaged groups (e.g., women). In Studies 1 to 10 (total N = 5,955), we clarified these relations by controlling for shared variance between distinct gender identity aspects. Acceptance and belongingness were positively related to a range of well-being variables. Centrality was negatively related to well-being. These results were consistent across genders. Studies 11 to 14 (total N = 2,380) found that the negative relation between gender centrality and well-being might be mediated by perceived pressure to conform to the masculine role among men and perceived gender inequality among women. These results uncover a burden of strong gender identity.

The effect of group membership and individuating information on automatic and deliberate evaluation of well-known people.

People's automatic (unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient) preference between social groups often determines their automatic preference between unknown individual members of these groups, a prominent example for automatic prejudice. What happens when the person making the judgment has long known the target individuals? Practice might automatize the deliberate judgment of the individuals. Then, if deliberate judgment is nonprejudiced, automatic prejudice might decrease. In 29 studies (total N = 4,907), we compared preferences between a famous member of a dominant social group and a famous member of a stigmatized social group on indirect measures of evaluation that were developed to measure automatic preference and on self-report measures. In most studies, we chose pairs based on prior self-reported preference for the member of the stigmatized group. The measures showed discrepancy, with indirect measures suggesting an automatic preference for the member of the dominant group. We replicated these results with various target individuals, two pairs of social groups (Black/White, old/young), two indirect measures, and in two countries (Studies 1-23). The indirectly measured prodominant preference was stronger when visual characteristics of the group were present rather than absent (Studies 24 and 25), suggesting a stronger effect of group characteristics on automatic than on deliberate preference between the individuals. On self-report and indirect measures, the preferences between individuals were related to the preferences between their groups (Studies 26 and 27) yet also to individuating information (Studies 28 and 29). Our results suggest that group evaluation plays a central role in the automatic evaluation of familiar (and not only novel) members of stigmatized groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The good and the bad: Are some attribute words better than others in the Implicit Association Test?

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most popular measures in psychological research. A lack of standardization across IATs has resulted in significant variability among stimuli used by researchers, including the positive and negative words used in evaluative IATs. Does the variability in attribute words in evaluative IATs produce unwanted variability in measurement quality across studies? The present work investigated the effect of evaluative stimuli across three studies using 13 IATs and over 60,000 participants. The 64 positive and negative words that we tested provided similar measurement quality. Further, measurement was satisfactory even in IATs that used only category labels as stimuli. These results suggest that common sense is probably a sufficient method for selection of evaluative stimuli in the IAT. For reasonable measurement quality, we recommend that researchers using evaluative IATs in English select words randomly from the set we tested in the present research.

Need some help, honey? Dependency-oriented helping relations between women and men in the domestic sphere.

Five studies (N = 2,339) found that men and women, especially if high on benevolent sexism, engage in dependency-oriented cross-gender helping relations in domestic tasks. Study 1 revealed that, in response to hypothetical scenarios of cross-gender helping interactions in traditionally feminine domains (e.g., cooking a dish), men's benevolent sexism correlated with their intentions to seek dependency-oriented help (direct assistance, rather than tools for autonomous coping) from women, and women's benevolent sexism correlated with their intentions to provide dependency-oriented help to men. Study 2 revealed that the association between benevolent sexism and (a) men's intentions to seek, and (b) women's intentions to provide dependency-oriented help occurs in cross-gender, but not in same-gender, interactions. Studies 3 and 4 replicated these patterns while examining help-seeking (among men) and help-providing (among women) behavior in a test about common domestic tasks (e.g., how to clean a burned pot). Study 5 focused on heterosexual couples, revealing that when encountering difficulties in traditionally feminine domestic tasks (e.g., getting the kids ready for kindergarten): (a) men, especially if high on benevolent sexism, reported seeking more dependency-oriented help from their partners than women; (b) women, especially if high on benevolent sexism, reported providing more dependency-oriented help to their partners than men; and (c) engagement in dependency-oriented helping predicted an unequal division of household labor. We discuss these findings in light of previous theorizing and research on the social psychological barriers that reinforce men's relatively low involvement in the domestic sphere. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Can the Implicit Association Test Measure Automatic Judgment? The Validation Continues.

In this commentary, we welcome Schimmack's reanalysis of Bar-Anan and Vianello's multitrait multimethod (MTMM) data set, and we highlight some limitations of both the original and the secondary analyses. We note that when testing the fit of a confirmatory model to a data set, theoretical justifications for the choices of the measures to include in the model and how to construct the model improve the informational value of the results. We show that making different, theory-driven specification choices leads to different results and conclusions than those reported by Schimmack (this issue, p. 396). Therefore, Schimmack's reanalyses of our data are insufficient to cast doubt on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of automatic judgment. We note other reasons why the validation of the IAT is still incomplete but conclude that, currently, the IAT is the best available candidate for measuring automatic judgment at the person level.

Testing the judgment-related account for the extinction of evaluative conditioning.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) effects refer to changes in the liking of a neutral (conditioned) stimulus (CS) due to pairing with an affective (unconditioned) stimulus (US). Some research found that EC effects are resistant to presentations of the CS without the US, whereas other studies found evidence for extinction effects. A recent study found extinction of EC only when participants rated the CS before and after the CS-only presentations, but not when CS evaluation was measured once or indirectly with the evaluative priming task. In two experiments (total N = 2,181), we found no evidence that indirectly measured evaluation is sensitive to extinction, using an indirect evaluation measure with high sensitivity - the Implicit Association Test. However, unlike previous research, we found that evaluation of any stimuli (and not only the CS) before the CS-only presentations decreases self-reported EC effects. Our results are compatible with the conclusion that the extinction of EC is limited to evaluation measured directly. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, and conclude that the specific conditions (and mechanisms) that change the direct evaluative response are yet to be clarified.

Does discrimination beat association in the IAT? The discrimination-association model reconceived.

The discrimination-association model (DAM; Stefanutti et al. 2013) disentangles two components underlying the responses to the implicit association test (IAT), which pertain to stimuli discrimination (the strength of the association of the stimuli with their own category) and automatic association (the strength of the association between targets and attributes). The assumption of the DAM that these two components sum into a single process generates critical drawbacks. The present work provides a new formulation of the model, called DAM-4C, in which stimuli discrimination and automatic association are separate, independent, and competing processes. Results of theoretical and simulation studies suggest that the DAM-4C outperforms the DAM. The IAT effect is found to vary with the association rates of the DAM-4C and not with those of the DAM. The parameters of the DAM-4C fitted on data from a Coca-Pepsi IAT are found to account for variance in brand attractiveness, taste preference, and cola choice that is not accounted for by the D score and the diffusion model. In addition, the association rates estimated on data from a Black-White IAT are in line with expectations.

The effect of co-occurrence and relational information on speeded evaluation.

After co-occurrence of a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) with an affective unconditioned stimulus (US), the evaluation of the CS acquires the US valence. This effect disappears when information about the CS-US relation indicates that they are opposite in valence. In that case, people often show a contrastive effect, evaluating the CS with valence opposite of the US. We investigated whether the assimilative effect of co-occurrence persists and is only obscured by a stronger counteracting contrast effect of the inference from the CS-US opposition relation. Participants evaluated CSs that had opposite relations with the USs under time pressure, a condition that restricts inference processes more than it restricts the associative processes that might underlie the assimilative effect of co-occurrence. Evidence supporting the persistence of the assimilative effect emerged only in Experiment 2 (N = 79): Under time pressure, people evaluated creatures that ended positive sounds more favourably than creatures that ended negative sounds. However, no difference between the creatures' evaluations occurred under time pressure in Experiments 1 and 3 (Ns = 78, 460). These results are inconclusive because they might reflect equal contrastive and assimilative effects or no effects at all. We discuss further research directions to test our question.

Applicability increases the effect of misattribution on judgment.

Feelings and cognitions influence judgment through attribution. For instance, the attribution of positive feelings and cognitions to a stimulus leads to a positive judgment of that stimulus. We examined whether misattribution is moderated by the applicability of a distractor to the judgment question. For instance, when are people more likely to attribute to a target person the affective and cognitive experiences triggered by a kitten - when trying to judge the person's cuteness or trustworthiness? The kitten triggers experiences specifically relevant to cuteness, but people might more easily suspect the kitten's potential influence when judging cuteness rather than trustworthiness. Using the Affect Misattribution Procedure, we found that applicability increases the effect of misattribution on valenced judgments. The results emphasise the importance of specific information (rather than only general valence) in attribution and suggest that high applicability of distractors to the judgment question does not elicit effective correction.

How actions change liking: The effect of an action's outcome on the evaluation of the action's object.

People like positive objects (e.g., fun activities) and dislike negative objects (e.g., boring activities). However, objects usually do not appear in isolation; They are often objects of an action (e.g., the boring activities were canceled). Using a wide array of stimuli and procedures, 11 experiments (N = 5,573) found that evaluation of objects is biased by the outcome of an action performed on the objects. For example, when participants read that a gene increases the likelihood of possessing the trait kindness (an action with a positive outcome), they evaluated kindness more positively than after reading the gene inhibits the trait (an action with a negative outcome). Conversely, they disliked dishonesty more after reading about genes that increased dishonesty than after reading about genes that decreased dishonesty. The effect was incompatible with logical inference from the information provided. We found evidence that misattribution of the valence of the action's outcome to the action's object contributes to this effect. These findings extend knowledge about the factors that lead to evaluative change. Importantly, the results demonstrate a recursive evaluation process: The valence of the outcome of an action on the object determines the evaluation of the object, but the valence of the outcome is already based on a previous evaluation of the object itself. We discuss the possible implications of our findings to a wide range of research domains, such as moral judgment and economic decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

A multi-method multi-trait test of the dual-attitude perspective.

The dual-attitude perspective posits that it is useful for research and theory to assume two distinct constructs: explicit and implicit attitudes (or automatic and deliberate evaluation). Much evidence supports this perspective, but some important tests are missing, casting doubts on studies that relied on the perspective for inference. We used a multimethod multitrait design to extensively test the validity of the dual perspective. The dataset (N = 24,015) included measurements of attitudes in 3 domains (race, politics, the self) with 7 indirect measures, and at least 3 self-report measures for each attitude domain. The dual-attitude model fit the data better than a single-attitude model. Six of the 7 indirect measures were related to the implicit construct more than to the explicit construct. The evidence supports the dual-attitude perspective, bolsters the validation of 6 indirect measures, and clears doubts from countless previous studies that used only one indirect measure to draw conclusions about implicit attitudes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Implicit and explicit anti-fat bias: The role of weight-related attitudes and beliefs.

INTRODUCTION: The increasing prevalence of anti-fat bias in American society comes at a great cost to the health and well-being of people who are overweight or obese. A better understanding of the correlates of anti-fat bias would inform development of interventions for reducing anti-fat bias. Based on three theoretical perspectives, this study tested the relation between attitudes and beliefs about weight and anti-fat bias (implicit and explicit): (1) The belief that one is like people who are fat (social identity theory). (2) The belief that one can control her/his weight (attribution theory). And (3) the beliefs that most people prefer thin people and that weight is important (socio-cultural theory). METHODS: Participants were 66,799 volunteers (47,265 women, mean age of 27.88 ±â€¯11.9 years) who completed the Thin-Fat Implicit Association Test on the Project Implicit website (https://implicit.harvard.edu/) during 2016. Explicit anti-fat bias and weight-related attitudes and beliefs were assessed by self-report. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to examine links between weight-related attitudes and beliefs and anti-fat bias. RESULTS: All tested weight-related attitudes and beliefs were significantly (p < .001) correlated with explicit and implicit anti-fat bias, but some of the correlations were very weak. An examination of the relative contribution of the tested weight-related attitudes and beliefs to a model explaining anti-fat bias suggested that the strongest correlates of explicit anti-fat bias were the beliefs that weight was important (ß = 0.194, p < .001), that most people prefer thin people (ß = 0.177, p < .001), and that the respondent was like people who are fat (ß = -0.180, p < .001). DISCUSSION: The social-identity and socio-cultural theories may provide a stronger explanation for anti-fat bias relative to attribution theory. Future research could use longitudinal designs with more reliable measures in order to verify these cross-sectional findings.

Help to perpetuate traditional gender roles: Benevolent sexism increases engagement in dependency-oriented cross-gender helping.

Based on theorizing that helping relations may serve as a subtle mechanism to reinforce intergroup inequality, the present research (N = 1,315) examined the relation between benevolent sexism (i.e., a chivalrous yet subtly oppressive view of women) and helping. In cross-gender interactions, the endorsement of (Studies 1, 3, and 4) or exposure to (Study 2) benevolent sexism predicted (a) men's preference to provide women with dependency-oriented help (i.e., direct assistance) rather than tools for autonomous coping, and (b) women's preference to seek dependency-oriented help rather than tools for autonomous coping. Benevolent sexism did not predict men's and women's engagement in dependency-oriented helping relations in same-gender interactions. Studies 1 and 2 examined behavioral intentions in response to a series of hypothetical scenarios; Studies 3 and 4 examined actual behavior in tests of mathematical and logical ability, and pointed to assumed partner's expectations as a potential mediator. The converging evidence supports the hypothesis that benevolent sexism encourages engagement in cross-gender helping relations that perpetuate traditional gender roles.

Understanding and using the brief Implicit Association Test: recommended scoring procedures.

A brief version of the Implicit Association Test (BIAT) has been introduced. The present research identified analytical best practices for overall psychometric performance of the BIAT. In 7 studies and multiple replications, we investigated analytic practices with several evaluation criteria: sensitivity to detecting known effects and group differences, internal consistency, relations with implicit measures of the same topic, relations with explicit measures of the same topic and other criterion variables, and resistance to an extraneous influence of average response time. The data transformation algorithms D outperformed other approaches. This replicates and extends the strong prior performance of D compared to conventional analytic techniques. We conclude with recommended analytic practices for standard use of the BIAT.

A comparative investigation of seven indirect attitude measures.

We compared the psychometric qualities of seven indirect attitude measures across three attitude domains (race, politics, and self-esteem) with a large sample (N = 23,413). We compared the measures on internal consistency, sensitivity to known effects, relationships with indirect and direct measures of the same topic, the reliability and validity of single-category attitude measurement, their ability to detect meaningful variance among people with nonextreme attitudes, and their robustness to the exclusion of misbehaving or well-behaving participants. All seven indirect measures correlated with each other and with direct measures of the same topic. These relations were always weak for self-esteem, moderate for race, and strong for politics. This pattern suggests that some of the sources of variation in the reliability and predictive validity of the indirect measures is a function of the concepts rather than the methods. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Brief IAT (BIAT) showed the best overall psychometric quality, followed by the Go­No-Go association task, Single-Target IAT (ST-IAT), Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP), Sorting Paired Features task, and Evaluative Priming. The AMP showed a steep decline in its psychometric qualities when people with extreme attitude scores were removed. Single-category attitude scores computed for the IAT and BIAT showed good relationships with other attitude measures but no evidence of discriminant validity between paired categories. The other measures, especially the AMP and ST-IAT, showed better evidence for discriminant validity. These results inform us on the validity of the measures as attitude assessments, but do not speak to the implicitness of the measured constructs.

The effect of evaluation on co-occurrence memory judgement.

Three experiments tested the effect of an attitude towards an object on the memory judgement of whether this object co-occurred with positive versus negative stimuli. We induced positive or negative attitudes towards novel male stimuli, and paired each man with an equal number of positive and negative animals. In a memory test, participants reported more co-occurrences of same-valence man/animal pairs than opposite-valence pairs. This valence-compatibility effect occurred even when attitudes were induced after the pairing (Experiment 1), when participants knew that each man occurred with an equal number of positive and negative animals (Experiment 2), and in reports of clear memory of pairs that did not co-occur (Experiment 3). The present findings suggest that evaluation causes illusory correlation even when the co-occurring stimuli are not traits or behaviours attributed to the attitude object. The results question the validity of co-occurrence memory judgements as measures of co-occurrence awareness in evaluative conditioning (EC) research.

Overweight people have low levels of implicit weight bias, but overweight nations have high levels of implicit weight bias.

Although a greater degree of personal obesity is associated with weaker negativity toward overweight people on both explicit (i.e., self-report) and implicit (i.e., indirect behavioral) measures, overweight people still prefer thin people on average. We investigated whether the national and cultural context - particularly the national prevalence of obesity - predicts attitudes toward overweight people independent of personal identity and weight status. Data were collected from a total sample of 338,121 citizens from 71 nations in 22 different languages on the Project Implicit website (https://implicit.harvard.edu/) between May 2006 and October 2010. We investigated the relationship of the explicit and implicit weight bias with the obesity both at the individual (i.e., across individuals) and national (i.e., across nations) level. Explicit weight bias was assessed with self-reported preference between overweight and thin people; implicit weight bias was measured with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The national estimates of explicit and implicit weight bias were obtained by averaging the individual scores for each nation. Obesity at the individual level was defined as Body Mass Index (BMI) scores, whereas obesity at the national level was defined as three national weight indicators (national BMI, national percentage of overweight and underweight people) obtained from publicly available databases. Across individuals, greater degree of obesity was associated with weaker implicit negativity toward overweight people compared to thin people. Across nations, in contrast, a greater degree of national obesity was associated with stronger implicit negativity toward overweight people compared to thin people. This result indicates a different relationship between obesity and implicit weight bias at the individual and national levels.