ABSTRACT

The positivity-familiarity effect refers to the phenomenon that positive affect increases the likelihood that people judge a stimulus as familiar. Drawing on the assumption that positivity-familiarity effects result from a common misattribution mechanism that is shared with conceptually similar effects (e.g. fluency-familiarity effects), we investigated whether positivity-familiarity effects are qualified by three known moderators of other misattribution phenomena: (a) conceptual similarity between affect-eliciting prime stimuli and focal target stimuli, (b) relative salience of affect-eliciting prime stimuli, and (c) explicit warnings about the effects of affect-eliciting prime stimuli on familiarity judgments of the targets. Counter to predictions, three experiments obtained robust positivity-familiarity effects that were unaffected by the hypothesised moderators. The findings pose a challenge for misattribution accounts of positivity-familiarity effects, but they are consistent with alternative accounts in terms of affective monitoring.

摘要

积极-熟悉效应是指积极影响增加人们判断刺激为熟悉的可能性的现象。假设正面熟悉效应源于与概念上相似的效应（例如流畅性熟悉效应）共享的常见错误归因机制，我们调查了正面熟悉效应是否由其他错误归因现象的三个已知调节器限定：（a ）引发情感的原始刺激和焦点目标刺激之间的概念相似性，（b）引发情感的原始刺激的相对显着性，以及（c）关于引发情感的原始刺激对目标熟悉度判断的影响的明确警告。与预测相反，三个实验获得了不受假设调节器影响的强大的积极熟悉效应。这些发现对积极-熟悉效应的错误归因解释提出了挑战，但它们与情感监测方面的替代解释一致。