Participants and Design

180 participants were randomly assigned to the conditions of a 3 (intervention type:

color IAT, anagrams, without intervention) x 2 (mood and self-esteem scale: with, without) between subjects design. Assignment was balanced for gender. Most participants were directly approached on the campus of Humboldt University, Berlin. The rest of the participants were recruited by postings at the university buildings. Participants were nonpsychology university students, native German speakers, and had not participated in the lab’s previous studies. Their mean age was M = 23.13 years and ranged from 19 to 33 years. Participants were offered € 6 (approximately US $ 6 at the time) for taking part in a 45 minute lab experiment on personality traits.

Table 24

Overall Procedure and Design of Study 3

Cover story: Personality traits Duration

(Min.) (a) Direct trait measures - Trait form of the STAI and STAXI

- Speaking Anxiety Scale

- Bipolar self-ratings of anxiousness, angriness, conscientiousness, and intellect

- Social desirability scales - Biographical data

10

(b) IAT Anxiousness IAT 10

(c) Intervention Color IAT Anagrams Without 0/5

(d) Mood and self-esteem scale + - + - + - 0/2

(e) IAT Angriness IAT 10

n 30 30 30 30 30 30 ~41

Note. STAI = State Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAXI = State Trait Anger Expression Inventory, IAT = Implicit Association Test, + = with, - = without.

6.3.2 Assessments and Measures

Trait measures. Trait measures were identical to Study 2 except that some scales were dropped, and the items were answered on the computer in the lab. (For more detailed information about scale formats and item numbers see Methods section of Study 2.) The questionnaire started with the trait forms of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory STAI (Laux et al., 1981; English version: Spielberger et al. 1970) and the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory STAXI (Schwenkmezger et al., 1991; English version: Spielberger, 1988). Items of both questionnaires were randomly mixed and were followed by the second series of the Speaking Anxiety Scale (Spitznagel et al., 2000). Next, participants had to rate their conscientiousness and intellect on 10, and their anxiousness and angriness on 5 bipolar adjective pairs each. Pairs were mixed in a fixed random order and presented with a trait instruction. The questionnaire concluded with the Social Desirability Scales by Lück and Timaeus (1969) (English version: Crowne & Marlowe, 1960) and Stöber (1999; without the Item “Have you ever consumed drugs”). Internal consistencies of all trait measures were satisfactory, α > .75 for all scales. At the end of the questionnaire participants had to

report their age, sex, dominant hand, academic subject, length of time spent at university, whether they were still students (all were), and whether they had a permanent partner.

Mood Scale. This scale was version A of the Positive-Negative Mood Scale borrowed from the Multidimensional Comfort Questionnaire [Multidimensionaler Befindlichkeitsfragebogen, Steyer, Schwenkmezger, Notz, & Eid, 1997]. On 5-point scales (1 = not at all, 5 = very much) it assesses positive and negative mood with 2 unipolar items each (e.g., “fine”). Items were presented with a state instruction (“At the moment I feel …”) and answers were coded so that higher values indicated more positive mood.

Internal consistency of the Mood Scale was satisfactory, α = .88

State Self-Esteem Scale. This scale was a short form of the State Self-Esteem Scale from Heatherton and Polivy (1991) that was translated into German by Riketta and Dauenheimer (2002). The scale deals with self-evaluations (e.g., “I feel satisfied with the way my body looks right now”) that should be answered with regard to how a participant feels at the moment. Answers are given on a 5-point scale (1 = not true at all, 5 = perfectly true), with higher values indicating higher self-esteem. Out of the 20 item original scale I selected 8 items that showed corrected item-total correlations of r > .48 in two student samples (N = 142 and N = 115) of Riketta and Dauenheimer (personal communication, October 17, 2002). Internal consistency of the resulting scale was satisfactory, α = .80.

Anxiousness and angriness IAT. The procedures were identical to Study 2.

Color IAT. The procedure of the color IAT was identical to the anxiousness and the angriness IAT, but the stimuli closely followed the geometrical objects IAT presented in Mierke and Klauer (in press). While target (color of stimuli) and attribute (size of stimuli) categories were equal to Mierke and Klauer, I used meaningless strings rather than geometrical objects as stimulus material. Task sequence, stimuli, and task description are depicted in Table 25. The geometrical objects IAT was developed to asses interindividual differences in task-switching performance that were shown to reliably contaminate conventional IAT measures (Mierke & Klauer, in press) but not the improved IAT D measures (Greenwald et al., 2003). The geometrical objects IAT imposes an artificial contingency between the genuinely unassociated target category (color) and attribute category (size), so that all blue stimuli are big and all red stimuli are small. I employed the color IAT in order to use a evaluatively neutral IAT procedure for studying its ability to block transfer effects between different IATs. Therefore, my procedure strictly followed the anxiousness and angriness IAT. That was also true for the aspect that (contrary to

Mierke & Klauer, in press) within the combined tasks the stimuli alternated between target and attribute. The IAT score was computed as the difference between mean response latencies in the incompatible and the compatible pairing (sequence 3 – sequence 5, see Table 25).

Table 25

Color Implicit Association Test: Task Sequence and Task Description

Response key assignment

Sequence N of trials Task Left key Right key

1 40 Target discrimination Red Blue

2 40 Attribute discrimination Big Small

3 80 Initial combined task Red, big Blue, small 4 40 Reversed target discrimination Blue Red

5 80 Reversed combined task Blue, big Red, small Tasks

Target discrimination: Color of strings Attribute discrimination: Size of strings Blue versus red Big (22, 24) versus small (11, 12) fonts Nonrelevant size of targets:

Big (22, 24) or small (11, 12) fonts

Nonrelevant colors of attributes:

Yellow, green, or pink

Note. The Color IAT imposed an artificial contingency between target (color) and attribute (size) discrimination so that all blue strings were big and all red strings were small. Strings were xyxyx, yxyxy, yxxxy, xyyyx, and xxyxx.

Anagrams. Out of a list of 800 nouns that were analyzed by M. Schwibbe, Raeder, G. Schwibbe, Borchardt, and Geiken-Pophanken (1981) I selected 35 nouns the valences of which were rated as neutral, .08 > M > -.08, SD < .60, referring to a 5-point scale ranging from -3 = negative to +3 = positive. The places of two letters were switched within each of these nouns and the nouns were presented on the screen. Participants were instructed to type in the correct noun as quick as possible. If participants did not complete the full 35 nouns within five minutes the presentation of the remaining anagrams was stopped in order to keep time comparable for all participants.

6.4 Results