Jan
De Houwer
Mailing address: Jan De Houwer
Ghent University
Henri Dunantlaan 2
B-9000 Ghent
Belgium
Phone: 0032 9 264 64 45
Fax: 0032 9 264 64 89
E-mail: Jan.DeHouwer@UGent.be
SHORT CV
I received my Master and PhD degree in
Psychology from the
My research concerns the manner in which
spontaneous (automatic) preferences are learned and can be measured. Regarding
the learning of preferences, I focus on the role of stimulus pairings
(associative learning). With regard to the measurement of preferences, I
developed new reaction time measures and examined the processes underlying
various measures. In 2008, I received a 7 year Methusalem grant to continue my
research on these topics (see http://www.implicit.ugent.be/ ). Other research interests include
associative learning, stimulus-response compatibility, and attentional
bias.
I (co-)authored more than 100 publications in
international journals including Psychological Bulletin, Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior
Processes. I am currently editor of the journal “Cognition and
Emotion” and have fulfilled editorial duties for Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Experimental
Psychology, and Journal of Behaviour Therapy and
Experimental Psychiatry.
CONTENT OF SITE:
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In press paper + download preprints /
chapters
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Description of research topics
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Teaching and admin
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Editorial Duties
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Short Curriculum Vitae
Download full CV here (last update 23 December 2009) including a reference to all my publications. For reprints, please see below or email me at : Jan.DeHouwer@UGent.be
Research
In Press papers + Download preprints / chapters
In press papers:
- De Houwer, J., & Vandorpe, S. (in press). Using the Implicit Association Test as a measure of causal learning does not eliminate effects of rule learning. Experimental Psychology. Click here
- Hofmann, W., De Houwer, J., Perugini, M., Baeyens, F., & Crombez, G. (in press). Evaluative conditioning in humans: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. Click here
- Krieglmeyer, R., Deutsch, R., De Houwer, J.,
& De Raedt, R. (in press). Being
moved:
Psychological Science.
- Tibboel, H., De Houwer, J., & Field, M. (in press). Reduced attentional blink for alcohol-related stimuli in heavy social drinkers. Journal of Psychopharmacology. Click here
- Vogt, J., De Houwer, J., Moors, A., Van Damme, S., & Crombez, G. (in press). The automatic orienting of attention to goal-relevant stimuli. Acta Psychologica. Click here
Chapters + Difficult
to find papers:
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NEW: De Houwer, J. (in press).
Evaluative conditioning: A review of procedure knowledge and mental process
theories. In T. R. Schachtman & S. Reilly. Applications of learning and conditioning.
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NEW: De Houwer, J., & Moors, A.
(in press). Implicit measures: Similarities and differences. In B. Gawronski,
& B. K. Payne (Eds.), Handbook of implicit social cognition:
Measurement, theory, and applications.
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De
Houwer, J. (2009). Conditioning as a source of liking: There is nothing
simple about it. In Wänke, M. (Ed.). Frontiers of
Social Psychology: The Social Psychology of Consumer Behavior.
- De Houwer, J. (2009). Comparing measures of attitudes at the procedural and functional level. In R. Petty, R. H. Fazio, & P. Brinol (Eds.), Attitudes: Insights from the new implicit measures. Erlbaum. Click here
- De Houwer, J. (2009). The propositional approach to associative learning as an alternative for association formation models. Learning & Behavior, 37, 1-20. Click here
- De Houwer, J. (2007). A conceptual and theoretical analysis of evaluative conditioning. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 10, 230-241. Click here
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De
Houwer, J., & Moors, A. (2007). How to define and examine the
implicitness of implicit measures. In B. Wittenbrink
& N. Schwarz (Eds.).
Implicit measures of attitudes: Procedures and controversies (pp.
179-194). NewYork:
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De
Houwer, J. (2006). What are implicit measures and why are we using them. In R.
W. Wiers & A. W. Stacy (Eds.), The handbook of
implicit cognition and addiction (pp. 11-28).
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De
Houwer, J., Vandorpe, S., & Beckers,
T. (2005). On the role
of controlled cognitive processes in human associative learning. In A. Wills
(Ed.), New directions in human associative learning (pp. 41-63).
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De Houwer, J. (2003). A structural analysis of indirect measures of
attitudes. In J. Musch & K.C. Klauer
(Eds.), The Psychology of Evaluation: Affective Processes in Cognition and
Emotion (pp. 219-244). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Click
here (BIG FILE)
Automatic Affective Processing:
Main publications on this
topic:
- De Houwer, J., Teige-Mocigemba, S., Spruyt, A., & Moors, A. (2009). Implicit measures: A normative analysis and review. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 347-368. Click here
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De Houwer, J., & Moors, A. (in press). Implicit measures: Similarities and
differences. In B. Gawronski, & B. K. Payne (Eds.), Handbook of implicit
social cognition: Measurement, theory, and applications.
- De Houwer, J., & De Bruycker, E. (2007). The Implicit Association Test outperforms the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task as a measure of interindividual differences in attitudes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 46, 401-421. Click here
(Extrinsic)
Affective Simon task
In 1998, I introduced an affective variant of the Simon paradigm (De Houwer
& Eelen, 1998). In affective Simon experiments,
stimuli are presented that differ with regard to their valence but also with
regard to a second, non-affective feature. Participants have to process the
relevant feature in order to respond with a pre-determined positive or negative
word, while ignoring the valence of the stimuli. In a number of experiments, we
observed that responses were influenced by the match between the valence of the
correct response and the (to-be-ignored) valence of the presented stimuli (De
Houwer & Eelen, 1998; De Houwer et al., 2001). I
also created a variant in which approach and avoidance responses are used (De
Houwer et al., 2001) and a semantic variant of the Simon paradigm that can be
used to measure and study automatic semantic processing (De Houwer, 1998; Duyck & De Houwer, in press). More recently, I
developed the extrinsic affective Simon task (EAST) (De Houwer, 2003; De Houwer
et al., 2004). In these EAST studies, participants see white words that need to
be classified on the basis of stimulus valence and coloured
words that need to be classified on the basis of colour.
One can estimate the attitude toward a stimulus by presenting that stimulus on
the coloured trials and comparing the time needed to
give the extrinsically positive response (i.e., the response that has to be
made to positive white word) with the time needed to give an extrinsically
negative response (i.e., the response that has to be made to negative white
words). If on those coloured trials, the
extrinsically positive response is given more quickly than the extrinsically
negative response, one can infer that the stimulus presented on those trials is
positive. If the reverse is true, than the stimulus is negative. Although there
have been some studies supporting the validity of interindividual
differences in EAST effects as a valid measure of interindividual
differences in attitudes, studies at my lab suggest that of the EAST fails as a
measure of interindividual differences in attitudes
(De Houwer & De Bruycker, 2007, BJP). There are
some variants of the EAST that seem to provide better measures of interindividual differences in attitudes (De Houwer &
De Bruycker, 2007, IJP; 2007, JBTEP) and the (E)AST
still seems to work well at the item or group level (e.g., Voss et al., 2003,
Exp Psy). I was awarded a four year research on the
EAST that ended in December 2006.
Here you can
download an Inquisit program for a standard EAST
experiment (similar to Experiment 1 of my EAST paper).
(be sure to enter "1" or "2" as subject code because this
determines which counterbalancing condition will be applied)
Affective
priming
Together with Dirk
Hermans and Adriaan Spruyt,
I also conducted a number of experiments on the affective priming effect (De
Houwer et al., 1998, 2001, 2002; De Houwer & Randell, 2002, 2004; Hermans et al., 1994, 1996, 2001, 2003; Spruyt et al., 2002, 2004a, 2004b, in press a, in press b,
in press c). At
IAT
I have also been conducting experiments that look at the processes involved in
the Implicit Association Test (De Houwer, 2001; De Houwer et al., 2005). This
research explores the links between stimulus-response compatibility tasks and
the IAT (De Houwer, 2003). I also wrote a paper about the strengths and
limitations of the IAT as a tool for studying dysfunctional associations in
psychopathology (De Houwer, 2002). In 2005 (De Houwer et al., 2005), I argue
that the IAT can reflect several types of similarity, not only similarity with
regard to meaning (e.g., attitudes, stereotypes) or salience, but also
similarity with regard to other features such as perceptual features. More
recently, I have looked at the effects of propositional knowledge on IAT
effects (De Houwer, 2006; De Houwer et al., 2007). For a review of IAT
research, see our paper in Psychological Bulletin (De Houwer et al., 2009).
Workshops
On December 16th, 1998, Dirk and I organized a workshop on automatic affective
processing. This workshop resulted in a special issue of Cognition and
Emotion (De Houwer & Hermans, 2001). Together with Olivier Corneille (UCL,
Using implicit measures
In recent research, I've been involved in projects where tasks such as the EAST
and IAT are used to examine the relevance of automatic (implicit) attitudes and
associations in clinical psychology (e.g., social phobia: Tanner et al., 2006;
depression: De Raedt et al., 2006; Franck et al., in
press), health psychology (e.g., alcohol abuse: De Houwer et al., 2004; obesitas: Craeyenest et al.,
2005; smoking: De Houwer, Custers, & De Clercq, 2006), consumer psychology (Vantomme
et al., 2005, 2006), and adult attatchment (Dewitte & De Houwer, 2007, in press; Dewitte et al., in press). Reinout
Wiers, Bethany Teachman,
and myself have just completed a special issue of Journal of Behavior Therapy
and Experimental Psychiatry on the topic op implicit cognitive processes in
psychopathology. Geert Crombez
and I have been awarded a (big) grant from
Chapters
I completed a number of chapters in which I provide a conceptual analysis of implicit measures. The first provided a structural analysis of implicit measures and was published in 2003 in a book by Musch and Klauer. Click here (BIG FILE) for a copy of this chapter. The second is called "What are implicit measures and why are we using them?" that has appeared in the Handbook of Implicit Cognition and Addiction, edited by Reinout Wiers and Alan Stacy. It provides an answer to the questions posed in the title and should be particularly useful as an introduction to the literature on implicit measures of attitudes and cognitions, especially for researchers who want to start using these measures in more applied contexts. Click here (BIG FILE) for a copy of this chapter and here for a short comment that provides the essense of my ideas about what implicit measures and indirect measures are. Related to this, Agnes Moors and I published a paper in Psychological Bulletin in which we present an analysis of the concept "automaticity" (Moors & De Houwer, 2006). I have also written a chapter for a book of Wittenbrink and Schwarz that applies our analysis of automaticity to implicit measures. Click here for a copy of that chapter. There is a chapter for a book by Petty et al. that extends the structural analysis I presented in 2003. Click here for a copy of that chapter. I have published a conceptual and review paper about implicit measures in Psychological Bulletin (De Houwer et al., 2009) and have just finished a chapter that deals with how different implicit measures differ from each other (Click here ).
See CV for all references.
Evaluative Conditioning:
Main publications on this
topic:
- Hofmann, W., De Houwer, J., Perugini, M., Baeyens, F., & Crombez, G. (in press). Evaluative conditioning in humans: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. Click here
- De Houwer, J. (2007). A conceptual and theoretical analysis of evaluative conditioning. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 10, 230-241. Click here
- De Houwer, J., Baeyens, F., & Field, A. P. (2005). Associative learning of likes and dislikes: Some current controversies and possible ways forward. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 161-174. Click here
- De Houwer, J., Thomas, S., & Baeyens, F. (2001). Associative learning of likes and dislikes: A review of 25 years of research on human evaluative conditioning. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 853–869. Click here
Evaluative
conditioning refers to a change in the evaluation of a neutral stimulus (CS)
that occurs after the neutral stimulus has been paired with a (positive or
negative) affective stimulus (US). Sarah Thomas, Frank Baeyens,
and I published a review paper on this topic in Psychological Bulletin
(De Houwer et al., 2001). I was awarded a Unilever Research grant (1999-2000)
to look at applications of evaluative conditioning in a product development
context and a ESRC-ROPA (2001-2002) grant to look at associative transfer of
non-evaluative stimulus properties (see Meersman et
al., 2005). Andy Field and I have organized a symposium on evaluative
conditioning during the Joint Meeting of the BPS and EPS, Leuven,
April 9 2002, and Andy, Frank Baeyens and I organized
a special interest meeting this topic, Le Lignely,
Belgium, 27-29 May 2002. We have recently completed a special issue of
Cognition and Emotion on the topic of evaluative conditioning that appeared in
2005. Recently, I did some studies on the usefulness of implicit measures of
attitudes to measure changes in valence (De Houwer, 2006). I have completed an invited paper in
which I provide a conceptual and theoretical analysis of evaluative
conditioning (click here
for a copy) and a chapter directed at consumer psychologists (click here for a copy).
See CV for all references.
Associative Learning:
Main publications on this
topic:
- Mitchell, C. J., De Houwer, J., & Lovibond, P. F. (2009). The propositional nature of human associative learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 183-198. Click here
- De Houwer, J. (2009). The propositional approach to associative learning as an alternative for association formation models. Learning & Behavior, 37, 1-20. Click here
- De Houwer, J., & Beckers, T. (2002). A review of recent developments in research and theory on human contingency learning. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55B, 289-310. Click here
I have conducted a series of experiments on cue competition in human contingency learning. A first series of studies showed that backward blocking depends on how the CSs are introduced to the participants (De Houwer et al., 2002). In a second paper (De Houwer, 2002), I showed that forward blocking occurs only when the blocked cue is explicitly represented as being absent during the elemental phase. This is problematic for associative models such as the Rescorla-Wagner and SOP models. I have also demonstrated higher-order retrospective revaluation in a number of studies (e.g., AB+ and BC+ followed by A- will not only affect ratings for B but also ratings for C; De Houwer, 2002a, 2002b). At the moment, Stefaan Vandorpe, Tom Beckers, and I are examining the role of deductive reasoning processes in human causal learning. I have also written an invited review about recent developments in research and theory on human contingency learning (De Houwer & Beckers, 2002), a chapter on the role of controlled cognitive processes in human associative learning (De Houwer et al., 2005) and a theoretical paper about the role of higher-order reasoning in cue competition (De Houwer et al., 2005). Tom has a paper in press JEP:General about reasoning in rats. I've recently started doing research on avoidance learning. The idea I want to test is whether avoidance behavior can function as a negative occasion setter, that is, as something that signals when a Sd-Sr will no longer be valid. For more information, see De Houwer, Crombez, and Baeyens (2005). I've received a grant to further test the occasion setting theory of avoidance learning. This research is currently conducted by Mieke Declercq who obtained her PhD in 2009. I wrote a large theoretical review paper on the merits of a propositional approach to learning (De Houwer, 2009). Chris Mitchell, Peter Lovibond, and I wrote another paper on this topic that was published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Mitchell et al., 2009).
See CV for all references.
Stimulus-Response Compatibility:
The Stroop effect was the topic of my Master thesis (completed in 1991). In a number of experiments, I tested the model of Stroop performance proposed by Glaser and Glaser. As a spin-off of my recent research on the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task, I've also written some papers on the role extrinsic (i.e., short-term) S-R associations in various SRC tasks (e.g., De Houwer, 2003, 2004; De Houwer et al., 2005).
Attentional bias:
I have been involved in a number of recent studies on attentional bias effects, mainly as a collaborator of Ernst Koster, Karin Mogg, and Brendan Bradley. More recently, Julia Vogt has been conducting research on the effects of goals on attentional bias (see Vogt et al., 2009). I’m also supervising the PhD of Helen Tibboel who is conducting research using the attentional blink paradigm (see Tibboel et al., 2009).
Teaching, Graduate Supervision, and Admin
Since October 2004, I'm a full professor. My main assignment is doing research.
I do, however, teach the second year course on Learning Psychology. I am also
supervising the PhD of Julia Vogt, Helen Tibboel, Katrien Vandenbosch, Evelien Bossuyt (with Agnes
Moors), Tom Everaert (with Adriaan
Spruyt), Jeffrey Dewinne,
Sarah Opsomer (with Baptist Liefooghe),
Hendrik Slabbinck
(Department of Marketing; with Patrick Van Kenhove),
and Riccardo Zanon (with
Anne Gast) and have been the co-supervisor of the PhD
of Tom Beckers (now a Senior Lecturer at the
University of Amsterdam), Agnes Moors (who is now working as a post-doc in my
lab), Tom Meersmans, Adriaan
Spruyt (now a post-doc in my lab), Delphine Vantomme, Els De Bruycker, Stefaan Vandorpe, Marieke Dewitte (now a postdoc at my department), and Mieke
Declercq (now a postdoc in
my lab).
I’m
head of the research group “Learning and Implicit processes” at
Editorial Duties
Current:
- Co-editor (together with Dirk Hermans), Cognition & Emotion (2008 - 2012)
- Member of the Editorial Board, Experimental Psychology (2002-...)
- Member of the Editorial Board, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry (2006-...)
Past
- Associate Editor, Cognition & Emotion (2001-2006)
- Editor-Designate (together with Dirk Hermans), Cognition & Emotion, 2007.
- Associate Editor, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2005-2006)
- Consulting Editor for Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2005-2006)
Curriculum Vitae
- 12-12-1968: Born in
- 1991: Master in Psychology,
- 1997: PhD in Psychology,
- 1998: Lecturer in
Psychology,
- 2001: Senior Lecturer,
- 2004: Professor,
- 2004: Awarded the prize of
Laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences (
- 2006: Proximus for the Honorary Doctoral Degree awarded to Prof. Robert Rescorla.
- 2007: Appointed as Co-editor of Cognition and Emotion (together with Dirk Hermans)
- 2008: Awarded Methusalem financing
Last modified 23 December 2009.