Compare methods

	Sequential Priming	Affective Priming Task
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1994
Originator	Social cognition priming tradition (Fazio and colleagues)	Dirk Hermans, Jan De Houwer & Paul Eelen
Type	General reaction-time priming framework	Reaction-time automatic evaluation paradigm
Seminal source	Fazio, R. H., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On the automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(2), 229-238.	Hermans, D., De Houwer, J., & Eelen, P. (1994). The affective priming effect: Automatic activation of evaluative information in memory. Cognition and Emotion, 8(6), 515-533.
Aliases	Prime-Target Priming, Semantic-Affective Priming, Response-Window Priming	Affective Priming Paradigm, Naming Affective Priming, Pronunciation Priming Task
Related	3	3
Summary	Sequential priming is the general experimental framework underlying many implicit social-cognition measures: a prime is presented, followed after some interval by a target to which the participant responds, and the speed of responding reveals what the prime automatically activated. By varying the prime-target relation (semantic, affective, stereotypic, goal-related) and the stimulus onset asynchrony, researchers can map which associations are activated, how quickly, and whether the activation is automatic or strategic. Short intervals isolate automatic spreading activation that participants cannot control, while longer intervals permit controlled processes. Evaluative priming, affective priming, and stereotype priming are all special cases of this logic, making sequential priming a unifying methodological backbone for studying automatic mental processes in social psychology.	The affective priming task, developed by Hermans, De Houwer, and Eelen in 1994, demonstrates that stimulus evaluation is automatic and goal-independent. Like evaluative priming it pairs a valenced prime with a valenced target, but instead of asking participants to judge the target's valence it asks them simply to pronounce or name the target aloud as fast as possible. Targets are named faster when preceded by an affectively congruent prime than an incongruent one, even though the naming task never requires evaluating valence. This is a crucial theoretical point: because evaluation facilitates responding even when it is irrelevant to the task, the affective reaction must be triggered automatically and unintentionally. The naming variant became an important tool for distinguishing genuinely automatic evaluation from response-competition artifacts that can arise in valence-classification tasks.