Psychology 3723F/G Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Subliminal Stimuli, Robert Zajonc, Scott Beach

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3723F/G
• Professor: James M Olson

Document Summary

The persuasiveness and power of emotion are pervasive. Mere exposure to a stimulus may be sufficient, even without a direct interaction, to evoke a positive attitude. This mere exposure effect occurs when repeated, simple exposure to an object leads to more favorable feelings toward the object. For example, an abstract painting that initially evokes no reaction might become liked over time. Conducted several clear experiments to demonstrate the mere exposure effect. In these experiments, participants were exposed to sets of novel foreign words; chinese ideographs or human faces they then had to evaluate each stimulus using a good-bad scale. Analyses of these ratings revealed that participants formed more positive evaluations of the stimuli that they had been shown more frequently. The effect of repeated exposure diminished somewhat at higher exposure levels, but the overall effect was powerful. The mere exposure effect occurs for many types of attitude object, including colors, food, flavors and geometric figures.