First see, then nod: the role of temporal contiguity in embodied evaluative conditioning of social attitudes

Head nodding and shaking are bodily signals of approval and disapproval, respectively. Previous research has shown that these movements can be used to shape attitudes by means of evaluative conditioning. In the present experiment, the authors studied the conditions under which evaluative conditioning with head movements can alter social attitudes. Specifically, the authors investigated whether the evaluative conditioning effect depends on the order in which the target stimulus and the head movement are presented. The results showed that repeated coupling of head nodding with out-group names reduced negative implicit associations with this out-group only when the head nodding movement followed the target name. No effects were found when the movement preceded the name in the conditioning procedure. The authors conclude that embodied evaluative conditioning effects are constrained to a sequence of the target stimulus and head movement that corresponds to the natural temporal script in which the stimulus precedes the evaluative embodied reaction.