Affective and cognitive influences on the immediate expression of attitudes: Are feelings really first

Four studies examined the notion that there is a special relationship between the phenomenologically affective attitude (i.e., the valence of a person's emotions and feelings toward an object) and the immediate attitude (i.e., the most rapidly activated and expressed evaluation of an object). Two related hypotheses were tested. The first hypothesis was that the most immediate attitude, as revealed by the automatic evaluative priming effect of words presented for a very brief interval upon pronunciation response to target words, would correspond more closely to the affective (versus cognitive) attitude. Study 1 measured the affective and cognitive components of existing attitudes preselected to have affective-cognitive valence discrepancy. Although the measure developed to measure affective and cognitive components proved externally valid, Study 1 failed to replicate previous evaluative priming results; a second, follow-up study provided only conditional support for the idea that automatic priming is affectively determined. A third study attempted to manipulate attitude basis by instructing participants to first evaluate objects in a cognitive, versus affective, way prior to completing an automatic evaluative priming task. Although the manipulation was apparently effective, the basic automatic evaluation effect was again not replicated, and the cognitive focus condition actually showed a reversed priming effect. The second hypothesis was that affectively based attitudes would be expressed more quickly than cognitively based attitudes; this hypothesis was supported by the speed of evaluations under the different focus manipulations of Study 3, and by the results of Study 4, which examined attitude response time as a function of measured attitude basis.