WHEN DOES CONTEXTUAL POSITIVITY INFLUENCE JUDGMENTS OF FAMILIARITY? INVESTIGATING MODERATORS OF THE POSITIVITY-FAMILIARITY EFFECT

The positivity-familiarity effect suggests that people use positive affect as a cue to answer the question of whether they have encountered a stimulus before. Five experiments investigated this effect under various conditions. Positivity-familiarity effects were obtained irrespective of whether the task context suggested a correct answer to the question of whether a given target stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar. However, effects were less reliable when participants had a basis to assume that they had been presented with the target stimuli earlier in the same study and when they were asked to indicate whether the targets had been presented before (instead of judging them as familiar or unfamiliar). Positivity-familiarity effects were also obtained irrespective of whether affective primes were presented for short, moderate, or long durations. However, effects were less reliable for short compared to moderate and long prime presentations. Implications for the positivity-familiarity effect and other misattribution phenomena are discussed.