Adriaan Spruyt, Ph. D.

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My research program centers upon the study of implicit attitudes and their relationship to behavior. At the fundamental research level, I investigate (a) the conditions under which both affective and non-affective stimulus information become activated from memory, and  (b) the acquisition and generalization of spontaneous preferences. In each of these research lines, I focus heavily on the impact of personal goals and task-demands on lower-level automatic processes (e.g., Spruyt et al., 2009, Journal of Memory and Language). At the applied research level, I actively study the processes that drive various indirect (attitude) measures (e.g., affective priming paradigm, implicit association test, affect misattribution paradigm, etc.) and I apply these measures in the context of social cognition, consumer choice behavior, alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, depression, anxiety, implicit self-esteem, sexual preferences, and food preferences. I also developed a new reaction-time measure that allows for an assessment of automatically activated attitudes in the absence of an explicit evaluative processing mindset (see Spruyt et al., 2007, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). Finally, I examine the usefulness of statistical modeling techniques to improve the reliability and predictive validity of various implicit (attitude) measures.

Last update: 2011-09-23