Children's implicit attitude acquisition: Evaluative statements succeed, repeated pairings fail.

From the earliest ages tested, children and adults show similar overall magnitudes of implicit attitudes toward various social groups. However, such consistency in attitude magnitude may obscure meaningful age-related change in the ways that children (vs. adults) acquire implicit attitudes. This experiment investigated children's implicit attitude acquisition by comparing the separate and joint effects of two learning interventions, previously shown to form implicit attitudes in adults. Children (N = 280, ages 7-11 years) were taught about novel social groups through either evaluative statements (ES; auditorily presented verbal statements such as 'Longfaces are bad, Squarefaces are good'), repeated evaluative pairings (REP; visual pairings of Longface/Squareface group members with valenced images such as a puppy or snake), or a combination of ES+REP. Results showed that children acquired implicit attitudes following ES and ES+REP, with REP providing no additional learning beyond ES alone. Moreover, children did not acquire implicit attitudes in four variations of REP, each designed to facilitate learning by systematically increasing verbal scaffolding to specify (a) the learning goal, (b) the valence of the unconditioned stimuli, and (c) the group categories of the conditioned stimuli. These findings underscore the early-emerging role of verbal statements in children's implicit attitude acquisition, as well as a possible age-related limit in children's acquisition of novel implicit attitudes from repeated pairings.

Elaborated contextual framing is necessary for action-based attitude acquisition.

Although arm flexion and extension have been implicated as conditioners of attitudes, recent work casts some doubt on the nature and strength of the coupling of these muscle contractions and stimulus evaluation. We propose that the elaborated contextual framing of flexion and extension actions is necessary for attitude acquisition. Results showed that when flexion and extension were disambiguated via elaborated contextual cues (i.e., framed as collect and discard within a foraging context), neutral stimuli processed under flexion were liked more than neutral stimuli processed under extension. However, when unelaborated framing was used (e.g., mere stimulus zooming effects), stimulus evaluation did not differ as a function of muscle contractions. These results suggest that neither arm contractions per se nor unelaborated framings are sufficient for action-based attitude acquisition, but that elaborated framings are necessary.