Evaluative Conditioning Flashcards
What is Evaluative Conditioning?
Changes in liking of a stimulus when it is paired with either positive or negative events.
Which areas of society does Evaluative Conditioning impact?
Advertising, Politics and social interactions.
What is the main flaw in Evaluative Conditioning, as stated by many researchers?
Evaluative Conditioning may reflect an effect of experimenter demand, rather than a genuine change in participants liking of stimuli.
Which procedure can help demonstrate genuine changes in liking of stimuli in Evaluative Conditioning?
Implicit Association Test (IAT) where participants are asked to make liking or disliking responses to stimuli as quickly as they can.
How does Evaluative conditioning relate to Pavlovian conditioning?
During Pavlovian conditioning, we prefer a conditioned stimulus rather than a unconditioned stimulus, which relates to the liking and disliking of evaluative conditioning.
What did Todrank et. al (1995)’s research reveal about evaluative conditioning with smells?
Positive smells produced an increase in attractiveness ratings of photographs of people, compared to neutral smells.
What is a significant problem experimenters face during Evaluative conditioning?
Demand characteristics where participants’ actual liking hasn’t changed, they just chose to change it for the purposes of the experiment.
Explain what Straats and Straats (1958) found in their two simultaneous lists experiment?
Participants rated negative words & names with higher unpleasantness and positive words & names with higher pleasantness
If an experimenter asked participants open-ended questions following the experiment is this effective?
No, because using open-ended questions may create biased responses for individuals that plan to leave in a rush or aren’t taking the experiment seriously. Even though it is used to test awareness, people who are unaware of evaluative conditioning would show no evidence of learning, so open-ended responses would be useless.
What is the best way to make sure participants are not aware of evaluative conditioning taking place?
Having conditioning trials embedded within irrelevant information to make them stand out less, therefore participants would have less awareness of conditioning.
This was used in Olson & Fazio (2001) wherein they used a video surveillance task asking participants to judge images that had positive and negative associations attached to them. The roles were switched for the second group.
Results showed that participants rated the positively-associated images as more pleasant than the negatively-associated images. All participants (excluding those aware of experimental purpose) were completely unaware of the CS-US pairing.
What is the ‘Compatible’ condition in the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?
Each word is paired with an assiciated conditioned stimuli of the last trial.
What is the ‘Incompatible’ condition in the Implicit Association Test (IAT)?
Words and associations are switched compared to the ‘Compatible’ condition, making it harder for participants to respond.
Why is the IAT less susceptible to demand effects?
Participants respond as quickly as they can instead of using time to evaluate the stimuli.
In terms of Conditioned Taste Aversion, what did Bernstein (1978) find in children undergoing chemotherapy?
Children who experienced icecream before chemotherapy chose not to have icecream following treatment.
What was Broberg and Bernstein (1987)’s solution to Conditioned Taste Aversion in chemotherapy patients?
Provide a ‘scapegoat’ flavour in order to reduce the effects of chemotherapy-induced illness on individual appetite.
