The evaluative conditioning (EC) phenomenon is central to the study of preference acquisition and attitude formation. Early studies have reported EC in the absence of awareness, but more recent work has questioned this conclusion. In previous work, using briefly presented and pattern-masked conditioned stimuli (CSs), we found that above-chance…

Though panel data are increasingly used in the social sciences, the question whether repeatedly participating in a panel survey affects respondents' attitudes and (response) behaviour is still largely unsolved. Drawing on a model of associative networks that is extended by assumptions on survey satisficing, we present a theoretical framework that…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a change in liking of neutral conditioned stimuli (CS) following pairings with positive or negative stimuli (unconditioned stimulus, US). A dissociation has been reported between US expectancy and CS evaluation in extinction learning: When CSs are presented alone subsequent to CS-US pairings, participants cease to…

Stimuli encoded shortly before an aversive event are typically well remembered. Traditionally, this emotional memory enhancement has been attributed to beneficial effects of physiological arousal on memory formation. Here, we proposed an additional mechanism and tested whether memory formation is driven by the unpredictable nature of aversive…

Universities find themselves faced with the conflicting institutional demands of being cathedrals of learning and research as well as introducing managerial and corporate-like structures. Despite many studies in higher education research that focus on how this situation affects the mission of universities, the role of imprinting has not received…

According to distractor-based response retrieval (Frings, Rothermund, & Wentura, 2007), irrelevant information will be integrated with the response to the relevant stimuli and further, the immediate repetition of irrelevant information can retrieve the previously executed response thereby influencing responding to the current target (leading…

Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not…