抄録
In order to investigate the relation between the words that the word "radiation" reminds people of and their attitude toward radiation, 107 participants performed a lexical decision task in a priming paradigm and an evaluation task. The former task examined which category of target words (positive, neutral, and negative) was automatically activated by the word "radiation". In the latter, the attitude toward the stimulus words of the lexical decision task, including "radiation", was measured. A comparison between the participants having a positive attitude towards radiation (the positive group) and those having a negative attitude (the negative group) showed that the priming word "radiation" facilitated the reaction time of the positive group toward the negative target words, and that the priming effect for the negative words was larger in the positive group than in the negative group. These findings indicate that those having a positive attitude toward radiation have a structured knowledge of words related with radiation, which is structured with the value (good and not good), and that the knowledge on radiation of those having a negative attitude is relatively unstructured.
