Collaborative Research: Implicit bivalence: Testing boundaries, causes, and consequences of coactivating positive and negative implicit evaluations

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Social interactions, ranging from close others to relative strangers, involve rewards (e.g., comfort, approval, joy) and costs (e.g., rejection, disapproval, hurt). Even individuals in highly satisfied relationships can readily recall negative interactions with their partner. Both theory and intuition assume that feelings about significant others are complex. Yet, there is scant evidence that this complexity exists implicitly (i.e., knowledge that people often cannot deliberately bring to mind but that still impacts behaviors). Recent work shows that in the first milliseconds of perceiving a significant other, both positive and negative information is triggered. Clearly, the single individual most liked in a person’s life strongly activates immediate positive evaluations, but this same person also activates some negative evaluations immediately as well. The current studies investigate this early signature of implicit bivalence (i.e., immediately activated positivity and negativity). Specifically, is implicit bivalence triggered only by significant others with whom one has a long history of affectively-complex experiences? Alternatively, might a stranger with whom one has no past experience trigger implicit bivalence because interactions with any person have the potential to be rewarding but also costly? Importantly, what are the consequences of implicit bivalence for psychological functioning and behavior in relationships? Understanding the evaluations that immediately come to mind when one encounters or thinks about others informs how people quickly make sense of the rewards and costs of social dynamics, with implications for flexible and adaptive social functioning.Mental representations of others are the cognitive building blocks of human behavior and color perceptions and interpretations of a person’s actions and social interactions with them. One way in which mental representations help people to interpret and react toward others is through enabling rapid and spontaneous evaluations of them. These implicit evaluations are triggered effortlessly and unintentionally whenever one encounters, or simply thinks of, another person. Implicit evaluations deliver immediate information about the positivity and negativity of another person, influencing how we think and behave toward that other person. But initial research has revealed that rather than other people triggering either positivity or negativity, they in fact trigger both positivity and negativity, even for significant others. The current work investigates how this affective complexity develops, for whom it emerges, and what consequences it has for behavior. In so doing, the research examines the plausibility of two theoretical accounts for why implicit bivalence emerges. One account suggests that bivalence emerges whenever the information about the attitude object is affectively complex, which would suggest that bivalence occurs toward a wide range of objects and people but not for newly encountered others. The other view suggests that bivalence prepares the perceiver to react to all people because of their potential to behave in a positive and negative manner, which would suggest that bivalence might emerge for others regardless of any past history. The work utilizes a range of research designs to assess implicit evaluations for people and for everyday objects (e.g., tempting foods, cigarettes), increasing the generalizability of the findings, as well as for people and objects for which implicit evaluations are experimentally created in the lab (e.g., by associating a person or object with rewarding or aversive experiences). The findings will inform models of social cognition, with implications for theory and research on ambivalence, attitudes, implicit cognition, and relationship science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.