Lack of affective priming indicates attitude-behaviour discrepancy for COVID-19 affiliated words

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dc.contributor.authorMoro, Stefania S.
dc.contributor.authorSteeves, Jennifer Kate Evelyn
dc.date.accessioned2025-02-06T23:24:14Z
dc.date.available2025-02-06T23:24:14Z
dc.date.issued2021-11-09
dc.description.abstractThe ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the enforcement of national public health safety measures including precautionary behaviours such as border closures, movement restrictions, total or partial lockdowns, social distancing, and face mask mandates in order to reduce the spread of this disease. The current study uses affective priming, an indirect behavioural measure of implicit attitude, to evaluate COVID-19 attitudes. Explicitly, participants rated their overall risk perception associated with contracting COVID-19 significantly lower compared to their perception of necessary precautions and overall adherence to public health measures. During baseline trials, participants explicitly rated COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, similar to traditional unpleasant word stimuli. Despite rating the COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, affective priming was not observed for congruent prime-target COVID-19 affiliated word pairs when compared to congruent prime-target pleasant and unpleasant words. Overall, these results provide quantitative evidence that COVID-19 affiliated words do not invoke the same implicit attitude response as traditional pleasant and unpleasant word stimuli, despite conscious explicit rating of the COVID-19 words as unpleasant. This reduction in unpleasant attitude towards COVID-19 related words may contribute towards decreased fear-related behaviours and increased incidences of risky-behaviour facilitating the movement of the virus.
dc.description.sponsorshipThis research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (#327588) to JKES. SSM is supported by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) (#2015-00013) Postdoctoral Fellowship.
dc.identifier.citationMoro, S.S., & Steeves, J.K.E. (2021). Lack of affective priming indicates attitude-behaviour discrepancy for COVID-19 affiliated words. Sci Rep 11, Article 21912. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01210-9
dc.identifier.issn2045-2322
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01210-9
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/42627
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAttribution 4.0 Internationalen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectHuman behaviour
dc.subjectPsychology
dc.titleLack of affective priming indicates attitude-behaviour discrepancy for COVID-19 affiliated words
dc.typeArticle

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