[1] This type of priming entails the evaluation of people, ideas, objects, goods, etc., not only based on the physical features of those things, but also on affective context.
One finding of studies that use this paradigm says that “performance is typically faster and more accurate when a prime and target are congruent and have the same emotional information (e.g., “flower”–“wedding”) compared with when they are incongruent and have different emotional information (e.g., “party’ –“corpse”).”[5] Affective priming has been long said to be related to implicit attitudes .
Some arguments in favor of a strong relationship between the two argue that these affective priming processes 1) lack intentionality, 2) are highly efficient, 3) have reduced controllability, 4) are triggered at a high speed, especially when there is a motivationally relevant stimulus, and 5) there is reduced awareness of the origin, meaning, and occurrence of the response.
[7] Seib-Pfeifer and Gibbons have suggested that affective priming processing is linked to the right central-to-parieto-occipital positive slow wave (PSW).
[6] Other factors that contribute to this relationship between affective priming and automatic processing include switching tasks,[8] salience asymmetry,[9] and potentially strategic recoding.