Rebecca Weil

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security · Empirical Research Support

Researchers invested enormous efforts to understand and mitigate the concerns of users as technologies collect their private data. However, users often undermine other people’s privacy when, e.g., posting other people’s photos online, granting mobile applications to access contacts, or using technologies that continuously sense the surrounding. Res...

The positivity-familiarity effect refers to the phenomenon that positive affect increases the likelihood that people judge a stimulus as familiar. Drawing on the assumption that positivity-familiarity effects result from a common misattribution mechanism that is shared with conceptually similar effects (e.g., fluency-familiarity effects), we invest...

The positivity-familiarity effect suggests that people use positive affect as a cue to answer the question of whether they have encountered a stimulus before. Five experiments investigated this effect under various conditions. Positivity-familiarity effects were obtained irrespective of whether the task context suggested a correct answer to the que...

How do people process and evaluate falsehood of sentences? Do people need to compare presented information with the correct answer to determine that a sentence is false, or do they rely on a mismatch between presented sentence components? To illustrate, when confronted with the false sentence ‘trains run on highways’, does one need to know that tra...

The danger of receiving false information is omnipresent, and people might be highly vigilant against being influenced by falsehoods. Yet, as research on misinformation reveals, people are often biased by false information, even when they know the valid alternative. The question is: why? The current research explores the relative encoding strength...

Priming effects in the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) have been explained by a misattribution of prime-related affect to neutral targets. However, the measure has been criticized for being susceptible to intentional use of prime features in judgments of the targets. To isolate the contribution of unintentional processes, the present research...

Chapter 7 provides an overview of frequently used indirect measures and recent research in the area of indirect attitude measures. It summarizes current implicit attitude theories and focuses on the introduction of common indirect measures. Each measure is briefly depicted and the proposed underlying mechanisms are discussed. The descriptions of th...

Attitudes are a core construct of social psychology, and research showed that attitudes can be acquired by merely pairing neutral stimuli with other liked or disliked stimuli (i.e., evaluative conditioning, EC). In this research we address the role of different memory processes contributing to EC. Although it is commonly found that memory for the p...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to changes in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its repeated pairing with an unconditioned stimulus (US). One of the most debated topics in EC research is whether or not EC is dependent on contingency awareness. In this study, we go beyond this debate by examining whether contingency awareness...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is the change in liking due to the paring of an affectively meaningful and a neutral stimulus. Starting with the exemplary question of why we like the iPhone, this article provides an overview of past and present research and gives an outlook to future research on this topic. We outline four different theoretical EC acc...

In this article, we address how attitudes are acquired. We present evaluative conditioning (EC) as an explanation for attitude formation and attitude change. EC refers to changes in liking due to pairings of affectively meaningful and neutral stimuli. We discuss four different theoretical accounts of EC and outline current issues and avenues for fu...

It is a psychological truism that thought shapes language. However, the idea that language constrains cognition is less well understood and has been debated in philosophy, linguistic, and psychology. The goal of the present research was to investigate the influence of language, as given in linguistic categories, on the formation of evaluations in a...

WICHTIGER HINWEIS: Aufgrund eines Computerfehlers bei der Rohdatenaufbereitung, müssen die 5.2.3. Ergebnisse (S. 43 ff.) wie folgt korrigiert werden: Explizite Einstellungsmessung Die Ergebnisse ändern sich inhaltlich: Haupteffekt Wortvalenz F(1, 94) = 51.10, p < .001, η2 = .35, (Mpos= 5.06; Mneg= -28.51); Interaktionseffekt Wortvalenz und kognitiv...