Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies have linked the Stroop Effect with social priming, suggesting that social concept priming tends to triggerautomatic behaviour aligned with the primed concept (Augustinova & Ferrand, 2014; Goldfarb, Aisenberg, & Henik,2011). This study attempts to test the efficacy of social priming on alcohol attentional bias, integrating a social priminginterference task into an alcohol-Stroop test to measure Stroop interference before and after participants have been sociallyprimed. Results show no significant interaction between stimulus category (alcohol and neutral), experiment block, andsocial priming condition (alcohol addiction, alcohol preoccupation and control) to indicate that social priming had trig-gered expedited, automatic behaviour. Our results do show a significant interaction between experiment block and socialpriming condition (F(6, 426) = 2.166, p = .045), suggesting the alcohol social priming tasks may have induced a greatergeneral interference for participants in those conditions, than for participants receiving the neutral interference task.