Study Of Subliminal Affective Priming Effect On Optimistic Bias

Optimistic bias is a prevalent psychological phenomenon in human society. Optimistic bias means the psychological expectation that people tend to think good things happen to them and bad things happen to others. Among the researches on the cognitive mechanisms of how optimistic bias generates, the main representative theory is self-centered doctrine and focused doctrine. Social cognitive theory of optimistic bias notes that situational factors are important variables which influence optimistic bias. While in many scenarios variables, mood is an important factor affecting the optimism bias. Previous studies show that emotions can change the individual optimistic bias. Positive emotions can affect individuals to generate more enthusiastic optimistic bias, while negative emotions can lead individuals to produce more passive optimistic bias. However, previous researches are focusing on the apparent supraliminal emotion, and this view is supported by the mood-situation consistency theory. That is to say, what circumstance determines what kind of cognitive status. It is meaningful to study whether the same effect exists in unconscious emotions when subliminal affective priming occurs.This study aims to use emotional pictures and vocabularies to initiate subliminal affective priming, and then investigate the influence of subliminal affective priming on optimism bias. In the first experiment we use emotional pictures to cause subliminal affective priming, and then examine the differences between explicit optimism bias and implicit optimism bias. In the second experiment we use emotional vocabularies to cause subliminal affective priming, and then examine the differences between explicit and implicit optimism bias. The main research results are as follows:(1) Subliminal affective picture priming can have an impact on subsequent explicit optimistic bias. Positive emotion pictures can promote individuals to have a greater optimistic bias, namely to increase the assessment probability of "good things happen to their own".(2) Subliminal affective picture priming can also have an impact on subsequent implicit optimism bias. Positive and negative emotion pictures can induce individuals to produce more implicit optimism bias effect, much higher than neutral pictures.(3) Subliminal affective vocabulary priming does not have an impact on subsequent explicit and implicit optimism bias. In the conditions with whether positive or negative emotional vocabulary, there are not significantly different for individual explicit and implicit optimism bias.In this study, two behavior experiments show that the optimistic bias is affected by subliminal affective priming, and emotional words and pictures have different effects. This study also supports the social cognitive theory of optimistic bias influenced by situational factors, namely subliminal positive emotions will induce individuals to form positive optimism bias. In summary, optimistic bias is affected by emotions whether it is the explicit or unconscious emotions.