Priming

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Dialogic resonance, or the tendency for speakers to reproduce constructions across speaker turns, is a compelling type of coordination in everyday conversation. In (1), speaker B resonates with A along words, structures and meanings, while at the same time disagreeing with him. Moreover, as indicated by the square brackets, the disagreement is produced in overlap with A’s prior turn, a turn-taking pattern that has previously been more commonly associated with agreement (Pomerantz, 1984).

(1) A: she hasn’t hitherto been particularly interested in religious things [has she]
B: [you mean] she hasn’t particularly been up at seven AM

In this study, we take a closer look at why and when speakers make use of each other’s contributions in dialogue. What are the social and cognitive aspects underpinning this behaviour? Previous work in two different areas of dialogue research offers different explanations. Du Bois (2014), on the one hand, argues that resonance is a socially motivated phenomenon that occurs for various communicative purposes, while Garrod and Pickering (2004) regard dialogue in general to be an automatic cognitive process facilitated by the reuse of prior expression. In this study, we aim to provide empirical evidence in support of the close association between social motivation and cognitive facilitation in dialogic resonance in everyday conversation.
We explore (i) social motivation through the functions that resonance has in discourse (agreement vs. disagreement) and (ii) cognitive facilitation through measurements of turn transitions. Firstly, based on previous research on the potential for resonance to occur in disagreement (Dori-Hacohen, 2017), we predict that

• resonance is more likely to be used by speakers in disagreement, while non-resonance is the preferred option in agreement.

Secondly, based on the view that the reuse of prior expression has a facilitating effect (Garrod & Pickering, 2004), we predict that

• transitions between speaker turns are faster in resonating sequences compared to when the sequences are constructed anew.

In addition, we explore whether or not there are timing differences between agreement and disagreement.
The sample contains 100,000 words of everyday face-to-face conversation among dyads from London–Lund Corpus 2 of spoken English. Using ELAN, we extracted 260 resonating and 316 non-resonating sequences, and analysed them in terms of function (agreement vs. disagreement) and the duration of turn transitions. Then, we fitted mixed-effects regression analyses to the data to test the predictions above.
The results provide full support for the first prediction. We propose that this is due to the cooperative nature of everyday conversation and the important role that resonance plays in mitigating the force of the ensuing disagreement through linguistic parallels. The second prediction also receives support. We see this as an indication that resonance has a facilitating effect on turn uptake, prompted by the activation of the same linguistic representations in the prior turn. Even though disagreements were expressed later than agreements, their mean durations were still strikingly fast (200–300 ms). This leads us to conclude that, in resonance, the face-saving intersubjective motivations of resonance combine with its facilitating cognitive effect to promote smooth communication.

References
Dori-Hacohen, G. (2017). Creative resonance and misalignment stance: Achieving distance in one Hebrew interaction. Functions of Language, 24(1), 16–40.
Du Bois, J. W. (2014). Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics, 25(3), 359–410.
Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy? TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1), 8–11.
Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds), Structures of social action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge University Press.

Early emergence and stand establishment of maize (Zea mays L.) are considered to be the most important yield-contributing factors. The influence of seed vigor on these factors is vital. Therefore, five laboratory tests and field experiment were conducted on basis of a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with five replications in 2011, to evaluate the correlation among the seed vigor tests and field emergence of two maize hybrids (SC704 and SC500). In laboratory tests, differences between two hybrids for cold test and electrical conductivity test were significant (P≤0.01). The leachates of hybrid SC500 was 35% higher than the leachates of hybrid SC704. However, high germination percentage was obtained by hybrid SC740 in cold test. A Statistically significant difference was found between hybrids in field emergence percentage (P≤0.05). The field emergence of hybrid SC704 and hybrid SC500 was 71% and 37%, respectively. The farm emergence percentage had the significant negative correlation (-0.71) with conductivity test, but positive correlation (0.79) with cold test. No significant correlation between the standard seed germination and the field emergence was detected. Therefore, the standard germination test was not a good indicator for field emergence percentage. However, cold and conductivity tests were the best predictor of field emergence than all the other laboratory tests.

Abstract:  Extensive media coverage of a political issue has been shown to influence, or prime, the criteria used to judge overall performance of political leaders. This political priming effect is traditionally explained with network models of memory, which identify priming intensity and recency as key factors in determining the strength and endurance of a priming effect. However, these two assumptions of network models have not been directly tested in media studies. The potential of priming valence to influence the priming effect also has had little treatment. This experiment evaluated priming intensity, recency, and valence within a typical political priming context. In support of previous psychological findings, priming effects were apparent immediately following positively valenced primes, dissipating quickly thereafter. For negative primes, the influence of the prime on judgment formation was contingent on the individual's political leaning, in that individuals who would likely agree with the message exhibited priming effects and individuals who would likely disagree with the message exhibited little effect. The adequacy of applying associative memory models to political priming studies is discussed.
Citation: Dillman Carpentier, F. R., Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R., & Roskos-Ewoldsen, B. (2008). A test of the network model of political priming. Media Psychology, 11, 186-206.

Existing research on which citizens are most and least likely to exhibit media priming effects is inconclusive. Using a content analysis of campaign coverage and public opinion data from the 2006 Canadian election, this study examined the moderating role of voters’ political knowledge, interest in politics, news attention and discussion frequency. The results show that priming was not constant across political involvement variables. As predicted, it was strongest for citizens with moderate levels of knowledge and discussion, but was negatively related to interest. Compared to pessimistic and optimistic accounts of voters’ ability to resist media influence, the findings suggest a more nuanced perspective on citizen competence.

To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under a single process, priming, in which input increases the activation of stored internal representations. Imitation itself has generally been seen as a "special faculty." This has diverted much research towards the all-or-none question of whether an animal can imitate, with disappointingly inconclusive results. In the great apes, however, voluntary, learned behaviour is organized hierarchically. This means that imitation can occur at various levels, of which we single out two clearly distinct ones: the "action level," a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts, and the "program level," a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural "progr...

The article is focused on social causes of using provocations in advertising as tools of impact, consideration and comparison of provocative advertising and advertising with provocations. Analysis of main features of advertising with provocations, its essence and impact techniques of creolized advertising material that contains advertising. The article also studies riscogenics of provocations in commercial advertising, the role of provocations in building virtual social capital while promoting premium-level goods and services, as well as analysis of impact of social advertising on social actors.
Анализ социальных предпосылок применения в рекламном дискурсе провокаций как средств воздействия, рассмотрение и сравнение провокационной рекламы и рекламы-провокации. Анализ основных признаков рекламы-провокации, характера и механизма воздействия рекламных мультимодусных произведений, содержащих провокации. Изучение рискогенности провокаций в коммерческой рекламе, их роли при формировании виртуального социального капитала в процессе продвижения продуктов и услуг премиального ценового сегмента и в социальной рекламе при формировании новых ментальных установок членов социума.

Because red pens are closely associated with error-marking and poor performance, the use of red pens when correcting student work can activate these concepts. People using red pens to complete a word-stem task completed more words related to errors and poor performance than did people using black pens (Study 1), suggesting relatively greater accessibility of these concepts. Moreover, people using red pens to correct essays marked more errors (Study 2) and awarded lower grades (Study 3) than people using blue pens. Thus, despite teachers’ efforts to free themselves from extraneous influences when grading, the very act of picking up a red pen can bias their evaluations.

Can simply listening to a music piece affect the harshness of a moral judgement? A priming experiment was run to answer this question. Participants gave moral judgements, after listening to musical pieces inducing certain emo-tions (Joy, Relax, Sadness, Annoyance). After reading some vignettes about moral transgressions and rating them, they were asked to fill in a self-report affect questionnaire concerning the emotions experienced during their listening, and a test assessing musical sensitivity. In accordance with Greene's dual-process moral theory, classic moral vignettes fell into two categories: “high emotional involvement” (HEI) vs. “low emotional involvement” (LEI). Results show that the two emotions with a negative valence (Sadness, Annoyance) worsened the overall harshness of participants’ moral judgements while the positive emotions (Joy, Relax) weakened it; in the most arousing ones (Joy, Annoyance) the effect was increased, and the annoyance condition determined the highest moral harsh-ness. This effect was stronger in the HEI moral questions, as predicted by the dual-process moral theory.

Although much debate has recently focused on the robustness of certain types of priming effects in social psychology, few attempts have been made to examine the full breadth of this literature and consider what is known about priming and what is still left to learn. The goal of this special issue of Social Cognition was to provide such consideration. This final article of the special issue provides a brief overview and integration of the insights provided in each of the other articles included, focusing primarily on rev- elations about (a) the greater need for clarity and precision in conceptualizing and communicating about priming effects, (b) the issues concerning expectations of replication and when priming effects should occur, and (c) the new insights about the psychological processes by which primes activate stored representations and by which these activated representations are applied to judgment and behavior.

Religion plays an important role in human life. In a recent review, religiosity has been associated with prosocial behavior; although consistent, the association was weak (Saroglou, 2013). To understand religious prosociality, varying theoretical contentions were offered (Preston, Salomon, & Ritter, 2013). The present study tested Supernatural Monitoring Hypothesis and sought to identify the role of the thought of a watching God in a religious individual’s prosocial behavior. With this aim, an experiment was conducted with two groups of participants wherein the experimental group was primed with the thought of a watching God through a song translation. Results of independent samples t-test showed that religious participants who were primed offered more time for a volunteer work compared to those who were not primed. Implications of this study point to the role of the thought of a watching God - interestingly when primed through a song - in prosocial behavior.

Abstract: Two experiments (Ns = 314, 447) were used to evaluate the effectiveness of sexual cues in temporarily increasing young adults’ self-reported sexual permissiveness, as well as the effects of romantic cues in temporarily decreasing permissiveness. Participants were exposed to sexual or romantic cues embedded as a theme-defining component of an online game (Study 1) or in advertisements peripheral to the online game (Study 2). Sexual and romantic conditions were compared against a control condition. As hypothesized, participants in the romantic conditions rated themselves lower in sexual permissiveness, compared to participants in the sexual and control conditions, particularly when participants positively evaluated the online game experience. Findings suggest that exposure to entertaining media depictions of two people, as a committed couple, expressing love, as well as lust, for each other might deter young adults from considering engagement in casual sexual encounters indicative of “hookup culture.”
Citation: Dillman Carpentier, F. R. (2017). Priming sexual and romantic representations in two media environments: Sex encourages and romance discourages sexual permissiveness…sometimes. Journal of Sex Research, 54, 706-716.

The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefore, messages containing negated concepts can ironically prime mental representations and evaluations that are opposite to those intended. We hypothesized that the subtle presentation of a negated concept (e.g., “no smoking”) would activate ironic motivational orientations as well. We tested this hypothesis in a public health context. Smokers viewed photographs in which no-smoking signs were either inconspicuously embedded (prime) or edited out (control). Primed smokers showed amplified automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli, but not toward smoking-unrelated stimuli. Since passive priming effects generally serve to facilitate forms of action, not inhibit them, anti-smoking and other public health campaigns may ironically increase the very behaviors they seek to reduce.

A landmark 1967 study showed that simply seeing a gun can increase aggression—called the “weapons effect.” Since 1967, many other studies have attempted to replicate and explain the weapons effect. This meta-analysis integrates the findings of
weapons effect studies conducted from 1967 to 2017 and uses the General Aggression Model (GAM) to explain the weapons effect. It includes 151 effect-size estimates from 78 independent studies involving 7,668 participants. As predicted by the GAM, our naïve meta-analytic results indicate that the mere presence of weapons increased aggressive thoughts, hostile appraisals, and aggression, suggesting a cognitive route from weapons to aggression. Weapons did not significantly increase angry feelings. Yet, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis indicated that not all naïve mean estimates were robust to the presence of publication bias. In general, these results suggest that the published literature tends to overestimate the weapons effect for some outcomes and moderators.

Previous studies have demonstrated that the playing of videogames can have both intended and unintended effects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of videogames on players’ mental processes and behaviours in day-to-day settings. A total of 1,022 self-reports from 762 gamers collected from online videogame forums were classified, quantified, described and explained. The data include automatic thoughts, sensations and impulses, automatic mental replays of the game in real life, and voluntary/involuntary behaviours with videogame content. Many gamers reported that they had responded–at least sometimes–to real life stimuli as if they were still playing videogames. This included overreactions, avoidances, and involuntary movements of limbs. These experiences lasted relatively short periods of time and some gamers experienced them recurrently. The gamers’ experiences appeared to be enhanced by virtual embodiment, repetitive manipulation of game controls, and their gaming habits. However, similar phenomena may also occur when doing other non-gaming activities. The implications of these game transfer experiences are discussed.

This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based language spoken in the Republic of Cabo Verde. The CVC subject domain has at least three types of nominative anaphora: a subject clitic, a null subject, and a double-subject construction. This study is the first to examine the distribution of these subject categories by combining a quantitative methodology with formal syntactic theory, as well as insights from functionalist, usage-based, cognitive linguistic, and typological approaches. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on this issue that is intended to move the field past protracted theoretical debates over the morphosyntactic status and discursive functions of these grammatical elements. For instance, the formal category underlying subject clitics has been contested in CVC and cross-linguistically; some have claimed that they are independent pronouns that cliticize at the phonological level (Déprez 1994; De Cat 2005; Costa & Pratas 2013), others have identified them as inflectional affixes in the VP layer (DeGraff 1993; Baptista 1995; Culbertson 2010), while in language typology they are analyzed as ‘person markers’ that can engage in local grammatical agreement or nonlocal anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002; Siewierska 2004; Creissels 2005; Kari 2017). Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes.

This study examined how operating elderly or young avatars affected shoppers’ product perceptions and purchasing behaviors. It also investigated how virtual shopping experiences translated into prosocial behavior regarding a nonprofit organization supporting the elderly. Operating elderly avatars influenced shoppers’ product choice and walking speed while shopping compared to operating younger avatars. In addition, operating elderly avatars positively affected participants’ attitudes and willingness to donate to and volunteer for a nonprofit organization supporting the elderly. Statistical interactions between avatar age and a shopper’s ageism on behavioral and persuasion outcomes were also confirmed, and these findings implied an assimilation/contrast effect influenced by a shopper’s preexisting prejudices toward the elderly.

Social scientists and folk views have long had it that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behaviour, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality, however this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviours. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviours, and remarkably such effects hold irrespectively of degrees of religiosity. Building on and combining the strengths of previous field designs, I report here the results of a field experiment in Mauritius examining the effects of religious environments on cooperation in a naturalistic setting. These results were consistent with previous findings that religious cues may increase cooperation. Importantly, this effect was not dependent on degrees of prior religiosity. Plausible interpretations of such effects are discussed.

It is now a matter of scientific consensus that priming, a recency effect of activation in memory, has a significant impact on language users' choice of linguistic means. However, it has long remained unclear how priming effects coexist with the creative aspect of language use, and the importance of the latter has been somewhat downplayed. By introducing the results of two experiments, for English and Russian native speakers, this paper seeks to explain the mechanisms establishing balance of priming and language creativity. In study 1, I discuss the notion of collective language creativity that I understand as a product of two major factors interacting: cognitive priming effects and the unsolicited desire of the discourse participants to be linguistically creative, that is, to say what one wants to say using the words that have not yet been used. In study 2, I explore how priming and antipriming effects work together to produce collective language creativity. By means of cluster analysis and Bayesian network modelling, I show that patterns of repetition for both languages differ drastically depending on whether participants of the experiment had to communicate their messages being or not being able to see what others had written before them.

ObjectiveHealth advocates have focused on the prevalence of advertising for calorie-dense low-nutrient foods as a significant contributor to the obesity epidemic. This research tests the hypothesis that exposure to food advertising during television viewing may also contribute to obesity by triggering automatic snacking of available food.DesignIn Experiments 1a and 1b, elementary-school-aged children watched a cartoon that contained either food advertising or advertising for other products and received a snack while watching. In Experiment 2, adults watched a television program that included food advertising that promoted snacking and/or fun product benefits, food advertising that promoted nutrition benefits or no food advertising. The adults then tasted and evaluated a range of healthy to unhealthy snack foods in an apparently separate experiment.Main Outcome MeasuresAmount of snack foods consumed during and after advertising exposure.ResultsChildren consumed 45% more when exposed to food advertising. Adults consumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods following exposure to snack food advertising compared to the other conditions. In both experiments, food advertising increased consumption of products not in the presented advertisements, and these effects were not related to reported hunger or other conscious influences.ConclusionThese experiments demonstrate the power of food advertising to prime automatic eating behaviors and thus influence far more than brand preference alone.