A program of research investigates the hypothesis that affective responses reflect the ease of mental operations involved in stimulus processing. This hypothesis promises to integrate a variety of apparently unrelated preference phenomena under a common theoretical framework. It is proposed that a single process -- enhancement of processing fluency -- underlies the following phenomena: (i) the mere-exposure effect (repetition increases liking for objects), (ii) beauty-in-averages effect (prototypical objects are liked more then nonprototypical ones), (iii) preferences for objects presented with higher clarity or higher figure-ground contrast, (iv) preference for objects presented at longer durations, and (v) preference for objects when mental processing of their attributes has been facilitated with perceptual or semantic primes.
This research offers a systematic analysis of the relation between processing fluency, affective responses, and evaluative judgments. The studies employ a variety of preference tasks (liking for pictures, persons, words, categories of objects, abstract shapes) and a variety of manipulations (semantic priming, visual priming, repetition, clarity). Specific psychological mechanisms underlying the fluency-affect-judgment connection are explored and the nature of the underlying affective reactions are examined with psychophysiological measures.
This research project will advance our understanding of the relation between affect and cognition. Specifically, it will: (i) identify a new source of affective reactions (processing dynamics), (ii) provide an account of classic phenomena, such as the mere-exposure effect and beauty-in-averages effect, (iii) predict new preference phenomena, such as the influence of priming on affective responses that are not mediated by the semantic interpretation of the target, and (iv) identify potential biases that may result from differential fluency during social perception tasks.
