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

社会互动，从亲密的人到相对陌生的人，包括奖励（例如，舒适，认可，快乐）和成本（例如，拒绝，不赞成，伤害）。即使是在高度满意的关系中的人也能很容易地回忆起与伴侣的负面互动。理论和直觉都认为对重要的人的感觉是复杂的。然而，很少有证据表明这种复杂性是隐性存在的（即，人们通常无法刻意想起但仍会影响行为的知识）。最近的研究表明，在感知一个重要的人的最初几毫秒内，积极和消极的信息都被触发了。很明显，在一个人的生活中，最受喜欢的那个人强烈地激发了他立即的积极评价，但这个人也立即激发了他的一些消极评价。目前的研究调查了内隐二价的早期特征（即立即激活的积极和消极）。具体地说，内隐二价是否只由与自己有长期情感复杂经历的重要他人触发？另一种可能是，一个与你没有任何过去经历的陌生人会引发内隐两面性，因为与任何人的互动都有可能是有益的，但也有可能是昂贵的？重要的是，内隐两面性对人际关系中的心理功能和行为有什么影响？当一个人遇到他人或想到他人时，脑海中立即浮现的评价会告诉人们如何快速理解社会动态的回报和成本，这对灵活和适应性的社会功能有影响。对他人的心理表征是人类行为和色彩感知的认知基石，也是对一个人的行为和社会互动的解释。心理表征帮助人们对他人做出解释和反应的一种方式是通过对他人进行快速和自发的评估。每当一个人遇到或想到另一个人时，这些内隐评价就会毫不费力、无意中被触发。内隐评价提供了关于另一个人的积极和消极的直接信息，影响我们对另一个人的想法和行为。但最初的研究表明，不是其他人触发积极或消极，而是他们实际上同时触发积极和消极，即使对重要的人也是如此。目前的工作是研究这种情感复杂性是如何发展的，它对谁产生，以及它对行为有什么影响。在这样做的过程中，研究检验了为什么内隐二价性出现的两个理论解释的合理性。一种说法认为，只要态度对象的信息在情感上是复杂的，二价性就会出现，这表明，二价性会出现在很多对象和人身上，但不会出现在新遇到的人身上。另一种观点认为，二元性使感知者准备好对所有人做出反应，因为他们有可能以积极和消极的方式行事，这表明，无论过去的历史如何，二元性都可能出现在其他人身上。这项工作利用了一系列的研究设计来评估人们和日常物品（例如，诱人的食物，香烟）的内隐评价，增加了研究结果的普遍性，也增加了在实验室中实验创建的内隐评价的人和物体（例如，通过将人或物体与奖励或厌恶的经历联系起来）。这些发现将为社会认知模型提供信息，并对矛盾心理、态度、内隐认知和关系科学的理论和研究产生影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.