Trial-by-trial effects in the affective priming paradigm

In this paper, we yield evidence for the dependence of affective priming on the congruency of the previous trial. Affective priming refers to the finding that valence categorizations of targets are facilitated when the preceding prime is of the same valence. In two experiments, affective priming was diminished after incongruent trials (i.e., prime and target were of different valence), whereas, significant affective priming was observed after congruent trials (i.e., prime and target were of same valence). We compare this pattern to the known sequential dependencies in Stroop- and Eriksen-type tasks. Furthermore, our results can help to improve the statistical power of studies in which the affective priming task is used as a measure for automatic evaluations of attitude-objects.