Automatic non-associative semantic priming: Episodic affective priming of naming responses Adriaan Spruyt a, * , Dirk Hermans a , Jan De Houwer b , Paul Eelen a a Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, Leuven B-3000, Belgium b Ghent University, Belgium Received 29 September 2003; received in revised form 5 December 2003; accepted 9 December 2003 Abstract Affective priming for associatively unrelated prime–target pairs was investigated using (a) the naming task, (b) a short stimulus onset asynchrony (250 ms), and (c) primes that had ac- quired their affective connotation during a differential evaluative conditioning procedure. De- spite the fact that the primes and the targets were related on the affective dimension only, significant priming emerged. This finding indicates that mere affective overlap is sufficient to produce automatic priming. As such, our results are in line with theoretical accounts of auto- matic priming that are based on semantic relatedness. Ó 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. PsycINFO classification: 2343; 2360; 3040 Keywords: Affective priming; Associative priming; Semantic priming 1. Introduction Although most researchers agree that the priming paradigm is a valuable tool for studying how knowledge is represented in memory, strong disagreement exists con- cerning the specific nature of the automatic priming effect: Whereas some researchers have argued that automatic priming can be found for semantically related prime–tar- get pairs that are associatively unrelated, many others have claimed that associative Acta Psychologica 116 (2004) 39–54 www.elsevier.com/locate/actpsy * Corresponding author. Tel.: +32-16-32-5895; fax: +32-16-32-5924. E-mail address: adriaan.spruyt@psy.kuleuven.ac.be (A. Spruyt). 0001-6918/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2003.12.012