Toward a greater understanding of the emotional dynamics of the mortality salience manipulation: revisiting the "affect-free" claim of terror management research.

The experimental manipulation of mortality salience (MS) represents one of the most widely used methodological procedures in social psychology, having been employed by terror management researchers in hundreds of studies over the last 20 years. One of the more provocative conclusions regarding this task is that it does not produce any reliable changes in self-reported affect, a view that we refer to as the affect-free claim. After reviewing 336 published studies that used the standard version of the MS task, we suggest that the evidence on which this claim is based may be less definitive than is commonly supposed. Moreover, we propose that the MS manipulation can, in fact, produce significant and meaningful changes in affect once one employs the appropriate measures and experimental design. In support of this position, we report 4 experiments, each of which demonstrates reliable activation of negative affect, especially with respect to fear-/terror-related sentiments. We discuss the implications of our findings for terror management theory as well as for research and theory on the measurement of mood and emotion.

Rally effects, threat, and attitude change: an integrative approach to understanding the role of emotion.

Rally 'round the flag effects (J. E. Mueller, 1970) represent sudden and dramatically powerful situation-specific shifts in attitudes toward the American president. However, the extant literature has yet to fully clarify the nature of the psychological dynamics associated with this effect. These ambiguities reflect fundamental differences of opinion among scholars on some very basic questions such as whether overtly experienced emotion should mediate these attitudinal shifts or whether these changes reflect more general shifts in conservative ideology. Across 4 experiments, the authors sought to gain greater clarity on these and other important matters using a multimethod approach in which the authors varied whether participants viewed documentary footage of the 9/11 attacks (Experiments 1-2), generated autobiographical memories of that event (Experiment 3), or retrieved nonpolitical memories from their past (Experiment 4). The authors discuss the relevance of the present findings for theory and research across a variety of different theoretical and methodological paradigms, including social psychological models of threat, emotional appraisal models, and the political science literature.

Contrast effects in priming paradigms: Implications for theory and research on implicit attitudes.

Contrast effects have been studied in dozens of experimental paradigms, including the measurement of attitudes in the social psychological literature. However, nearly all of this work has been conducted using explicit reports. In the present research the authors employed a variety of different types of priming tasks in order to gain insight into the nature of contrast effects and the role that automatic processes might play in their emergence. They report 6 experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2 the replicability and robustness of automatized contrast effects across 2 types of implicit tasks are established. Experiments 3-6 were conducted in order to further understand the nature of these effects and whether they are best understood in terms of spreading activation vs. response-based models of priming. In the course of accounting for their findings, the authors propose and validate a response-mapping framework, which provides insight into some longstanding ambiguities in the priming literature. Implications for theories of contrast and models of evaluative priming are discussed.

Stereotypes as dominant responses: on the "social facilitation" of prejudice in anticipated public contexts.

This article challenges the highly intuitive assumption that prejudice should be less likely in public compared with private settings. It proposes that stereotypes may be conceptualized as a type of dominant response (C. L. Hull, 1943; R. B. Zajonc, 1965) whose expression may be enhanced in public settings, especially among individuals high in social anxiety. Support was found for this framework in an impression formation paradigm (Experiment 1) and in a speeded task designed to measure stereotypic errors in perceptual identification (Experiment 2). Use of the process dissociation procedure (B. K. Payne, L. L. Jacoby, & A. J. Lambert, in press) demonstrated that these effects were due to decreases in cognitive control rather than increases in stereotype accessibility. The findings highlight a heretofore unknown and ironic consequence of anticipated public settings: Warning people that others may be privy to their responses may actually increase prejudice among the very people who are most worried about doing the wrong thing in public.