Psychological Reports: Mental & Physical Health 2012, 111, 3, 669-686. © Psychological Reports 2012 DOI 10.2466/07.17.21.PR0.111.6.669-686 ISSN 0033-2941 eFFectS OF SUBlIMINal aFFectIVe PRIMINg ON helPINg BehaVIOR USINg the FOOt-IN-the-DOOR techNIqUe 1, 2 INèS SKaNDRaNI-MaRzOUKI Aix-Marseille Université Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale, France yOUSRI MaRzOUKI Aix-Marseille Université & Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (CNRS), France ROBeRt-VINceNt JOUle Aix-Marseille Université & Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (CNRS), France Summary.—Two experiments examined the efect of subliminal afective prim- ing on compliance using the foot-in-the-door (FItD) paradigm. Prior to the tar- get request, participants were exposed to subliminal emotional expressions. FITD (presence vs absence of initial request) was crossed with Priming (positive, nega- tive, neutral, and absence of prime-blank screen) in a between-subjects design. 180 students volunteered as participants (M = 22 years). 20 participants (10 females) were assigned to each of eight experimental conditions plus the control condition that neither involved the initial request nor the priming experiment. Participants were asked to judge whether target sentences were relevant or not for road safety instruction. In Experiment 1, emotional valence of prime stimuli afected both en- dorsement rate and time devoted to the target request but not participants’ atti- tude. Afective priming efects did not interact signiicantly with the FITD efect. In experiment 2, in 180 more students, the attitude measure was replaced by an implicit recognition task. Results showed that regardless of priming condition, in the absence of FItD, participants recognized target sentences better than in the presence of FItD. conversely, in the presence of the FItD, participants recognized more accurately previously seen sentences that were primed by positive emotions relative to other priming conditions. the latter result suggests that the presence of the FITD involves a signiicant amount of cognitive resources so that only stimuli emotionally relevant to the task’s goal (i.e., positive) tend to be processed. together, these results could explain how, contrary to helping behavior, compliant behavior that has no direct association with the prime stimuli was not easily inluenced by the afective subliminal priming. The question whether subliminally presented stimuli inluence sub- sequent social behavior has a long and controversial history in social psy- chology. early research was particularly interested in the possibility of subliminal persuasion, with obvious applications in advertising and poli- tics, but the evidence was far from conclusive (see Dixon, 1981; holender, 1986, for critical reviews, and Strahan, Spencer, & zanna, 2002, for a more 1 address correspondence to yousri Marzouki, UFR de Psychologie, 29 avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 aix-en-Provence, France or e-mail (yousri.marzouki@univ-amu.fr). 2 this was presented as an oral paper at the consortium of european Research on emotion, Third European Conference on Emotion, CERE 2010 Proceedings, Lille, France, April 22–24, 2010. the authors would like to thank Jonathan grainger for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.