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The role of relevant recent autobiographical events

emotional valence on implicit measures of ethnic
attitudes
Irina Plotka

Nina Blumenau

Baltic Psychology and Management University College,

Riga, Latvia
irinaplotka@inbox.lv

Baltic Psychology and Management University College,

Riga, Latvia
nina.blum@gmail.com

Dmitry Igonin

Laura Simane

SIA Latenta Riga,

Riga, Latvia
latenta@balticom.lv

Baltic Psychology and Management University College,

Daugavpils University
Riga, Latvia
l.simane@inbox.lv

Abstract In recent years the encapsulation of an attitude, activated by autonomous automatic process, has been questioned. That is
why, it is necessary to control the influence of the extra-experimental episodic events, while implicitly measuring the attitude. The
participants of the recent study (N=176) were selected from two ethnic groups. Their ethnic attitudes were measured using implicit
measurement: the procedure of uncontious emotional priming and a self-report method, specially designed to assess the ethnic extraexperimental episodic events. The results showed that the extra-experimental episodic events have an influence on the reaction time, via
creating an obstacle to the automatic attitude activation. The results allow to develop a new attitude representation model in terms of
semantic and episodic component interaction.
Keywords- Ethnic attitude, Unconscious emotional priming, Explicit measurement, Implicit measurement, Episodic memory, Semantic
memory

I.

INTRODUCTION

Implicit attitude measurements usually are carried out

without controlling the influence on their participants of recent,
extra-experimental, episodic events that are connected with the
object of the attitude, e.g., [5]. At this case emotional valence
of attitudes and these events may not coincide. In
contemporary theories of social cognition the activation of
attitude in the semantic memory is understood as an
autonomous automatic process (AP), e.g., [9] and [4]. In
cognitive psychology absolute "encapsulation" of the AP in the
recent decades has been questioned [7]; [10]. Neumann
suggested that automatic processes depend on the current
"configuration of the cognitive system" - the factors of
attention and intentions of a person, and are exposed to the
influence of other processes that define the parameters for the
implementation of the AP [11]. A number of papers presented
the evidence of AP being influenced by various high-level and
contextual factors. That allowed to justify the previously
proposed concept of "conditional automaticity" [1]; [8].
However, the potential of the impact of extra-experimental,
semantically and emotionally associated with the attitude,
contextually episodic factors on the automatic activation of the
attitude has not yet been studied. Also little is known about the
general influence of these factors on the laboratory-studied
dependent variables in cognitive tasks. Coane and Balota [2],

probably were the first to report of the impact of the extraexperimental seasonal factors on reaction time in a lexical
decision task as a possible result of the long-term priming
effect. But this work does not concern the aspects of the
automatic activation of the attitudes. As an example of such
factors for the study of automatic activation of attitudes, in the
present work recent extra-experimental episodic events in the
lives of participants are chosen, which affect the emotional
valence of the implicitly measured ethnic attitude in
unconscious emotional priming task, combined with the lexical
decision task.
It is assumed that these events and their affective
components are represented in the episodic memory, while the
relevant attitude is represented in the semantic memory. At the
present version of the task, subliminally presented and
backwards masked primes are names of relevant ethnic groups,
which are connected with the aim stimuli emotionally valent
and neutral words from the scale of Schlosberg, to which nonwords are added. Task for the participants to determine the
presentation of word or non-word. Separately was controlled
the presence of participants with the recent critical,
autobiographical events connected with the attitudes and their
affective valence.

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The question of the present study is:

Is there a connection between the reaction time in the
implicit attitude measure task and affective valence of recent
episodic events?
The answer to this question raises the issue of long-term
emotional (semantic) priming mechanisms in the context of
episodic and semantic interactions, in the studies of the nature
of automatic processes and the representation of attitudes.
II.

METHOD

Fixation point 1000 ms. Prime exposure time 10 ms,

backward mask exposure time 41, 75, 109, 160, 194, 228,
500, 840, 993 msec. The target stimuli -816 ms.
Randomly presented intervals of stimulus onset asynchrony
SOA: 51, 85, 119, 170, 204, 238, 510, 850, 1003 msec. The
stimuli were presented one at a time in a newly randomized
order for each participant.
Abstract from the instruction to the participant: Push Y
key as soon as possible if the word appears, and N key if the
letters set (non-word) appears.

A. Participants
The participants were 176 undergraduate students from two
ethnic groups: Russians (N=111) and Latvians (N=65)
recruited from Baltic Psychology and Management university
college and several other higher schools in Riga. Groups were
created depending on the following criteria of ethnic identity:
language, culture and origin. In total, there were male - 54 and
female - 122 participants, in age group 19- 50 (Me=25).
After performing the experimental task participants
completed a specially designed questionnaire for assessing the
presence and extent of the emotional impact of the recent (up to
3 weeks old) incidents, involving inter-ethnic relations. As a
result, it was revealed that 176 participants, who reported the
presence of an emotionally meaningful inter-ethnic, recent
incidents.
B. Materials
Apparatus: IBM-compatible PC, custom-made software for
MS Windows XP.
The standardized experimental procedure of unconscious
emotional. The procedure of unconscious emotional priming
is an experimental procedure, where the target stimulus is
preceded on unconscious (subliminal) level by the exposition
of preparing stimulus emotionally connected with it and
distinguished by the subsequent perception mask (Fig.1).
5 Prime-stimuli were used names of ethnic groups
Russian, Latvian, French and neutral stimuli Chair. 12
Target-stimuli - Words from the Scale of Emotional
Responding by Schlosberg: love, joy, happiness, good;
rage, disgust, contempt, evil; collar, cup, sofa, grass and
set of letters (non-words): nevg, ravtoienescht, byovyul,
vatra.
A posttest questionnaire included a description of a possible
10 affectively significant inter-ethnic situations with a scale to
assess their affective valence, how long ago was the situation
(one to three weeks) and strength.
C. Procedure
The participants were tested and interviewed individually.
Participants were informed that they participate in an
experiment on the speed of the classification of words as
sequences of characters with different affective value. The
stimulus presentation procedure is presented in Fig.1. Intertrial
interval was 1000 ms.

Figure 1. quence of displays

After the experimental task, the participants were

administered the questionnaire. The experiment lasted
approximately 15 min.
III.

RESULTS

A. Reaction time studies with the impact of episodes

2.8% of all (19 008) observations, which were outside the
range of reaction time (RT) 160 - 1264 ms were omitted,
including 0.3% of the RT 160 ms and 2.5% greater than
1264 ms (RTs mean +3 SD). Since ethnic attitudes were
determined by shifts of RT, then the neutral prime (chair")
and the neutral target stimuli were not considered (Fig.2). The
distribution of the data does not match the normal distribution.
Using ANOVA the study of influence of the following factors
on the reaction time was carried out:
Group (RU - Russians, LV - Latvians);
Prime (two levels: Russian-R, Latvian-L);
SOA (9 levels),
Target (two levels: + - affectively positive words, e.g.
love; - - affectively negative words, e.g. rage);
Episodes EM (three levels: positive, neutral,
negative).
There were statistically significant influence of the factors
SOA (F = 4.02; p = 0.000 0.001) and Target (F =
145.00; p = 0.000 0.001), EM-1 (F = 8.80; p = 0.000
0.001 ) and the interaction of factors, "EM-1" and the Group
(F = 9.49; p = 0.000 0.001) (Fig.2-6). The statistical
significance of differences between the mean values for
different factors is established using the Scheffe's multiple
comparison procedure.

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Hypothesis
Positive and negative attitudes manifest themselves in
different reaction times (RT) for presented descriptive
attributes of the ethnic groups. A fast reaction to a positive
stimulus reveals a hidden positive attitude. A fast reaction to a
negative stimulus reveals a hidden negative attitude (Table 1).
The hypothesis is based on the assumption suggested by Fazio
that in case of positive attitudes to an object, the objects
exposure accelerates further cognitive processing of positive
stimulus (adjectives) (Fazio et al., 1986).

whether the presented noun denotes animate or inanimate

object is faster if the noun denotes animate object [6]). The
findings show that such effects are observed also in the task of
unconscious emotional priming, when presented target verbal
stimuli are affectively ambivalent and primed with affectively
connected with them

Figure 3. Means of RT. The influence of the factor SOA

Figure 2. Histogram with normal curve

B. The study of the reaction-time shifts

For the exposure of implicit attitudes the method of RT
shift was worked out [12]. RTs shift R was defined as the
difference between RT to a positive stimulus and RT to a
negative stimulus. The rule for finding the valence of attitude
follows Table 1 and the definition of the shift Table 2:
negative RTs shifts correspond to positive attitudes, positives
shifts correspond to negative attitudes. By means of ANOVA
the study of the RTs shifts influence on following factors was
conducted Group (RU, LV); Prime (Russian-R,
Latvian -L, French-F); SOA (9 levels); Episodes EM
(positive, neutral, negative).
Statistical significant influences on the RTs shifts is not
found. Therefore, it is possible to introduce general criteria for
determination the valence of attitudes in all observations, i.e.
the first and third quartiles (Q1 and Q3) and of RTs shift
variable. The shifts exceeded Q3 conform to negative
attitudes, shifts less than the Q1 conform to positive attitudes.
The shares of participants with different attitudes to the ethnic
groups were compared. Fisher's angular transformation and
Pearson's Chi-square criterion were employed.
IV.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

It was found that the means of reaction time for positive

target stimuli presented at the experiment is less than the
means of reaction time for negative ones (F=205.68;
p=0.0000.001) (Fig.3). This fact resembles the effects
observed during some types of explicit tests based on semantic
information. For example, verification of parity of numbers is
faster in the case of presentation of even numbers, rather than
odd numbers (see odd effect [2]; verification of the fact,

Figure 4. Means of RT. The influence of the factor Target

other verbal stimuli previously presented on subliminal level.

This phenomenon must be considered in the studies with the
use of the above procedure and is worth of a special research.
A remarkable fact was the affectively meaningful for the
participants recent extra-experimental events effect on RT
(Fig.5), regardless of the emotional valence of these events.
The fastest RT are registered for the group of participants, who
did not inform about such events or their affective significance
was denied by them. This suggests that the presence of recent
affectively significant episodic events creates an obstacle to the
activation of the automatic attitude.

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In this case the presence of a relevant episodic activation

can exert an inhibiting influence on the activation of the
attitude irrespective of correspondence of the sign (positive or
negative) of the episodic activation to the affective valence of
the attitude. If this assumption is valid, then either the stage of
an obligatory check for the presence of pertinent episodic
traces of events or the assumption about the inhibiting
influence of the relevant episodic activation on the activation of
the attitudes should be added to a cognitive model of attitudes.
The positive events, in contrast to the data by Coane and
Balota [3], slowed, not speeded lexical decisions for the
relevant words.

Figure 5. Means of the RT. The influence of the factor Episodes

This may be due to differences in experimental tasks used

and the nature of extra-experimental events. At the same time,
the result may be due to differences in the degree of formation
of the participants ethnic attitudes. In this case, for those of
them, who are sensitive to inter-ethnic relationship factors and
who have informed that corresponding recent events took
place, a high degree of ethnic attitude formation can be
assumed present. Other participants may possess less formed
ethnic attitudes, and corresponding events had no expected
affective effect on them. Control over the relevant factors will
facilitate the testing of this hypothesis in the following studies.
The nature of interaction of the "ethnic group" factors and the
"episodes" ones (Fig. 6) requires further investigation of the
reasons why the valency of the episodes has different effects on
RT in different ethnic groups. Further study of the connection
of the recent relevant extra-experimental events and implicit
measures of attitudes will allow to develop new concepts of
mental representation of attitudes, which will take into account
the interaction of the newly acquired episodic experience and
previously acquired experience, which is automatically
activated in semantic memory.
This is also important for understanding the significance of
implicit measures of attitudes.
REFERENCES
[1]

Figure 6. Means of RT. The influence of the factors Episodes*Group

TABLE I.

CONFORMITY OF THE REACTION TIME AT POSITIVE OR

NEGATIVE TARGETS AND THE PRESUMED ATTITUDE TO THE ETHNIC GROUP

[2]
[3]

RTs
Rapid

Slow

Positive stimulus

Positive attitude

Negative attitude

Negative stimulus

Negative attitude

Positive attitude

TABLE II.

CONFORMITY OF THE REACTION-TIME SHIFT AND THE

PRESUMED ATTITUDE TO THE ETHNIC GROUP
Reaction times shifts
Positive

Hypothetical attitude
to ethnic group

Negative

Null

Neutral

T T
Negative

Positive

[4]

[5]

[6]
[7]

[8]

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