Evaluative Conditioning

In psychology, evaluative conditioning is a type of Pavlovian conditioning in which presentation of an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., music, words, or pictures) already liked or disliked by a subject is used to affect the subject's preference for a conditioned stimulus, that is, something toward which he/she previously held a neutral attitude. Typically, people will come to like a conditioned stimulus more when it is paired with a positive unconditioned stimulus (something the person likes) and to like a conditioned stimulus less when it is paired with a negative unconditioned stimulus (something the person dislikes), suggesting that the like or dislike for the unconditioned stimulus is transferred to the conditioned stimulus. It is commonly accepted in psychology that many preferences are learned rather than the result of genetic factors and that likes and dislikes influence human behavior in many spheres, from consumer choice to the embrace of political candidates and parties. However, how likes and dislikes are formed is not well understood, and research into evaluative conditioning is one line of research within this larger project.

Research in evaluative conditioning dates back to the 1950s, when studies pairing nonsense words with words carrying a positive or negative affective value showed that the nonsense words tended to take on the same affective value as the words they were paired with. Similar work has been done with pictures: subjects who initially had a neutral response to a given picture would change their response to positive or negative to match their response to whatever picture the neutral picture was paired with. In a meta-analysis of 214 studies of evaluative conditioning, Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues found a mean evaluative conditioning effect size of 0.52, or just over half a standard deviation, with about 70 percent of the observed variance due to systematic variation rather than sampling error. They also found that evaluative conditioning effects were greater when data was self-reported, when the subject was aware of the pairing, and when the unconditioned stimulus was presented above the level of consciousness (at the supraliminal rather than subliminal level).

Evaluative conditioning is thought to be one of many mechanisms that explain why music can produce powerful emotional responses in listeners, and how this emotional response influences aesthetic evaluations of music. Other mechanisms underlying emotional responses to music include brain stem responses (such as to unexpected loud sounds), emotional contagion, visual imagery, episodic memory, rhythmic entrainment, and expectancy. According to multiple mechanisms theory, these mechanisms collectively explain why people have emotional responses to music. The study of evaluative conditioning with regard to music is thus an important field within music psychology, but it also has practical applications: [Page 424]For instance, a company creating an advertisement for a particular product may want to choose music that will put listeners or viewers in a particular type of mood in order to make them more inclined to buy the product. In another example, a politician may want to choose music for an election campaign that will cause listeners to see him or her in a positive light and thus be more likely to vote for him or her.

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