2007 Volume 16 Issue 1 Pages 25-35
Employing subliminal affective priming paradigm, this study examined the hypothesis that experiencing mildly stressful but repeated events, such as bullying, could induce traumatic schemata. It would be likely that such schemata could cause biases in processing event-related information even in non-clinical people. Undergraduates with and without bullying experiences, 23 and 48 women, respectively, were asked to engage in 40 experimental trials. In each trial, randomly one of the following prime words was subliminally presented: positive, blank, neutral, negative, and bullying-related, then a neutral target, one of 40 Nepalese words, followed, and participants rated liking of the target. Results indicated that in bullying-related prime condition, participants with bullying experiences rated target words significantly lower in liking, i.e., more negatively, than in neutral prime condition. It was argued that experiencing bullying could have induced traumatic schemata even in non-clinical people, and that bullying-related information activated them, which subsequently biased processing of neutral information. Finally, implications and limitations of the findings were discussed.
