Abstract
Four experiments were conducted to examine the subliminal affective priming effects on the Murphy & Zajonc's (1993) paradigm. In Experiment 1, 34 Ss were assigned to either the suboptimal or the optimal exposure conditions similar to the previous study. The strong priming effect that influences Ss' evaluation of target stimuli by prime valence was found under the optimal exposure condition but not under the suboptimal exposure condition. In Experiment 2, 45 subjects participated in testing whether their awareness of primes was a determinant of the priming effect as shown in Experiment 1. The results suggested that consciousness of primes plays a critical role in the occurrence of the priming effect. In Experiment 3 (51 subjects) and Experiment 4 (60 subjects), we focused our attention to the suboptimal exposure condition. Such factors as target characteristics, inter-trial intervals, visual angles of primes and replicated presentations of the same targets across the prime conditions were controlled because of their possible effects on priming. Neither of the two experiments revealed any significant priming effects under the suboptimal condition. These results pose a question about the generality of the phenomena that the previous research reported.
