Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP)

Background

The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is a cognitive-behavioral measure of unconscious (aka 'implicit') attitudes and bias. The AMP was developed by B. Keith Payne and colleagues in 2006 and uses a basic affective priming procedure that tests the impact of a briefly presented priming stimulus on a following target stimulus. The rationale of the AMP is that people, despite instructions to the contrary, cannot ignore primes and will (mis)attribute the attitudes the primes automatically activate to the stimuli (the targets) presented immediately after. So, for example, if you present a picture that activates a positive feeling for your participant (e.g. a beautiful blooming flower), this positive feeling will impact their assessment of the attractiveness of a random, neutral pattern. They are likely to judge the pattern to be prettier than if they had to judge the pattern's attractiveness after viewing an unpleasant picture (e.g. a picture of a wasp). Thus, by measuring the impact of different prime categories on target pleasant/unpleasant ratings of neutral items, researchers draw inferences about a person's (unconsious) attitudes towards the prime categories.

A basic AMP procedure consists of a sequence of trials that

1. Present a priming stimulus belonging to the category of interest (e.g. a brand logo). This prime stimulus is usually presented for a short, but still consciously processable ('supraliminal'), duration, e.g. 75ms. Because they are presented for such a short duration, they are referred to as 'flashes'.
2. Present the target stimulus, a neutral, ambiguous pattern, for a slightly longer duration, e.g. 100ms
3. Replace the target stimulus with a mask (e.g. a black-and-white noise image) to erase any lingering visual aftereffects of the target
4. Ask participants to categorize the target pattern as 'pleasant' or 'unpleasant'

In a series of experiments to validate the procedure, Payne and colleagues used prime images coming from categories that are universally regarded as favorable or unfavorable (images taken from the International Affective Picture System -IAPS) and tested their affective misattribution influence on Chinese pictograms, used as neutral ambiguous patterns. Instructions explicitly informed participants that they would see 'flashing' images which would act as 'warning cues' announcing the impending target symbols. Payne and colleagues found that even at relatively long prime durations the affective misattribution from primes to targets was still measurable in the number of pleasant ratings. Furthermore, in cases where participants were unmotivated to conceal their (explicit) attitudes, the researchers demonstrated that explicitly measured attitudes correlated with AMP results.

When dealing with clinical patient groups, the AMP has shown to be highly accessible for vulnerable patient groups as its simple response design ('Do you find this pattern pleasant or not?') is not cognitively demanding, does not give 'aversive' feedback and does not require fast motor responses as response time itself is not the target dependent variable (as opposed to the IAT).

The Millisecond AMP template implements a basic procedure to measure implicit attitudes towards flowers and insects that are used as pleasant and unpleasant primes, respectively. The template is designed to be easily adaptable to other target categories and languages.

Task Procedure

Participants work through 10 practice trials to get familiar with the procedure, followed by 48 test trials, running 16 trials for pleasant, unpleasant and neutral primes each in a random order. The pleasant primes run flower images, the unpleasant primes run insect images and the neutral primes run a simple gray shape. Each prime is presented for 75ms, followed by a blank screen for 125ms before the target stimulus (a randomly sampled image of 200 Chinese pictograms) appears. The target stays on screen for 100ms and is then replaced by a black-and-white pixelated mask. At this point, participants are asked to judge the Chinese symbols as 'unpleasant' or 'pleasant' by pressing the E or I keys on the keyboard, respectively.

What it Measures

The AMP measures unconscious bias via an affective priming procedure

Psychological domains

• Implicit Cognition: Cognitive Processes not under conscious control
• Social Cognition: People's thoughts and perceptions of themselves and others in the social world

Main Performance Metrics

• AMP Bias Scores: Difference score of proportion 'pleasant' ratings for prime categories of interest and the neutral baseline primes; main bias measure

Psychiatric Conditions

AMP procedures have been used with the following patient groups

• Eating Disorders
• Anhedonia
• Substance Use Disorders (SUD)

Test Variations

References

Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP).

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Murphy, S. T., & Zajonc, R. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 27-37.

Payne, B. K., Cheng, C. M., Govorun, O., Stewart, B. D. (2005). An Inkblot for Attitudes: Affect Misattribution as Implicit Measurement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 277-293.

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