This review focuses on priming phenomena in social psychology area. First, various
social priming phenomena were discriminated and I describe about trait priming. It
is included in the conceptual priming. Second, I refer to goal priming. Goal priming
activates motivation and often influences on behavior. Third, evaluative priming is
a very interesting procedure and is now used for measurement of implicit attitudes.
Fourth, affective priming is sometimes understood as mood congruent effect, however
I will introduce various dependent measure and compare two models. Fifth, mind-set
priming is a novel procedure and is paid much attention to as more complex procedure.
Lastly, I will introduce goal-directed behavior and counteractive self-control theory and
discuss the role of consciousness.

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In general, people tend to associate men with work-related concepts and women with
home-related concepts. In this study, we examined whether these beliefs about sex-
roles that people had implicitly and also explicitly were influenced by remembering
exemplars of homemakers (i.e., traditional women) or career women (i.e., nontradi-
tional women). Participants were asked to remember as many exemplars of traditional
or nontraditional women as they could and write down their names. Following this
manipulation, they completed the paper-and-pencil IAT measuring their implicit asso-
ciations between gender and concepts related to work and home. They then completed
a measure of explicit belief about sex-roles. The results showed that participants who
remembered exemplars of nontraditional women revealed weaker implicit male-work
and female-home associations than participants who remembered exemplars of tradi-
tional women. On the other hand, the explicit belief about sex-roles was not influenced
by the type of the remembered women exemplars. These results suggested that the
belief that people have implicitly about sex-roles might depend on the type of women
exemplars activated in situation. Finally, we discussed possible processes of the change
in implicit belief about sex-roles.

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We examined the effect of subliminal mere exposure on the implicit group evaluation,
focusing on the typicality of group members. Recent researches on the mere exposure
effects have suggested the important roles of the cognitive factors on preference forma-
tion. We considered the exposures to non-typical members in a group as the factor of
heterogeneity, investigating the optimum level of heterogeneity to improve the implicit
“Otaku” evaluation. We hypothesized that exposure to a few heterogeneous members
in a group would have a stronger effect. In the experiment, ten group members were
subliminally presented as “Otaku”, and the number of the typical members in the ten
members was manipulated. Then their implicit “Otaku” evaluations were measured
using the Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT). The results showed that the exposure
to the seven typical and three non-typical members produced the most powerful effects
in all conditions, whereas the exposures which contained more non-typical members
than typical members had no effect. The roles of heterogeneity in mere exposure effect
and implications for the unconsciousness of the higher mental processes were discussed.

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This study examines the effects of an incubation period on the creative thinking-
process, particularly on the metaphor creation process. In an experiment, participants
were asked to create“X like a Y” type metaphors on the basis of theme phrases, which
contain adjectives and nouns. Participants in the control group were asked to create
metaphors immediately after they were given the theme phrase. Participants in the in-
cubation group were asked to generate metaphors after a distracter task. Participants
in the wait group were asked to create metaphors after thinking for three minutes. The
results of the experiment revealed that when the theme phrases contained connected but
complex words, the incubation group created more metaphors than the other groups.
When the theme phrases contained diverse but disjointed words, the wait group created
more metaphors than the other groups.

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When people make inference about other’s mental state, they refer as an anchor to
privileged information which they know and other doesn’t know, thereafter they make
adjustment from the anchor to shared information which they know and other know.
When adjustment are insufficiently, they use more privileged information, and have
more egocentric biases. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether or not
considering an anchor could affect strength of egocentric biases. Participants read a
story about an e-mail sent from a person to another person and then the participants
were asked to infer mental state of recipient. In Experiment 1, participants were asked
to make a considering privileged information before making an inference. In Experi-
ment 2, cognitive load were operated, participants made an inference under a condition
prevented conscious cognitive process. These results showed that participants who con-
sidered privileged information had more egocentric biases. These results are discussed
cognitive processes controlling use of privileged information.

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Growing evidence has suggested interesting dissociations between conscious and sub-
conscious processing in insight problem solving. It indicates a possibility that the
process of insight problem solving is largely governed by an implicit learning mecha-
nism that detects the differences between current and goal states, and regulates the
strengths of the responsible operators. If the implicit learning mechanism takes part
in the insight problem solving process, the process might be affected by a hint stimu-
lus subliminally presented, because such a stimulus could not be used by the explicit
learning system. We examined this possibility using the continuos flash suppression
technique. The results of two experiments showed that subjects subliminally presented
with the goal state of a difficult insight puzzle solved it much faster than those in the
control group. These results were discussed in terms of unconscious nature of insight
problem solving, gradual tuning of operator strengths during the impasse, and roles of
subliminal hint information in the problem solving processes.

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It is an important question for the cognitive study whether implicit processes affect
metacognitive control or not. On the Koriat’s (2000) view, the subjective experience
is a product through implicit processes, and relates next metacognitive control. It is
unclear whether implicit processes influence metacognitive control. Our study investi-
gates this question with subliminal mere exposure paradigm. Other important ques-
tion is an individual difference of metacognitive process. Song, et al. (2011) showed
individual differences in metacognitive monitoring. The purposes of this study are to
examine whether (1) the implicit process relates metacognitive control, and (2) this
relation depends on individual differences in metacognitive monitoring. Experiment 1
consisted of 3 phases. First phase, participants were presented unfamiliar polygonal
shapes subliminally. Second phase, they studied the shape of polygons which were
exposed and unexposed at first phase by their pace. Third phase, they made recogni-
tion judgments on studied polygons and predicted their recognition performance. The
experiment showed that participants who can predict accurately their recognition per-
formance allocated more study time to unexposed polygons than exposed. This result
indicates that implicit processes may possibly drive metacognitive control through the
intermediary of metacognitive monitoring. However, this interpretation is based on an
assumption that off-line monitoring defined with the prediction accuracy of recognition
performance after self-paced study is identical with on-line monitoring which may in-
termediate the effect of implicit processes to control during self-paced study. Therefor
experiment 2 examines this assumption about relationship between off-line and on-line
monitoring. Our data showed that significant correlation between the on-line and the
off-line monitoring measure. The data indicates that the on-line and off-line monitoring
have a common process. Our results suggested that we could use the information from
the implicit process to metacognitive control.

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