There is scant evidence that incidental cues in the environment significantly alter people’s political judgments and behavior in a durable way. We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influence their behavior. In Experiment 1, which was conducted online during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants’ Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months after the exposure to the prime. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings more than a year into the current Democratic presidential term. These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability.

In this report, we argue that the intensity of the emotions people experience is partly determined by the goals they nonconsciously pursue, and that this effect is functional in nature: Emotions are modulated in ways that may increase the probability of goal achievement. To test this hypothesis, we primed female participants with a motherhood goal and then measured their level of disgust in response to mildly disgusting pictures. Priming led to a reduction of disgust in response to goal-relevant stimuli (e.g., pictures of babies with runny noses) but not goal-irrelevant stimuli. This effect was moderated by the women’s probability of conception, a proxy of their ability to pursue the motherhood goal.

While the study of nationalism has received much attention throughout the social sciences and humanities, the experimental investigation of it lags behind. In this paper we review recent advances in the examination of implicit nationalism. In the first set of experiments we survey, the Palestinian, Israeli, Italian, and Russian flags were primed (or not, in the control conditions) and their effects on political thought and behavior were tested. In the second set the American or the Israeli flag was primed (or not) and prejudice toward African‐Americans or Palestinians (respectively) was examined. The results of all experiments suggest that the implicit activation of national cues has far‐reaching implications on political thought and behavior as well as on attitudes toward minorities. Under the assumption that the image of national flags is associated in memory with national ideologies, these results suggest that national ideologies can be implicitly pursued in a way that significantly affects our thoughts and behaviors.

This investigation used a newly developed artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm in which participants were exposed to sequences of stimuli that varied in two dimensions (colours and letters) that were superimposed on each other. Variation within each dimension was determined by a different grammar. The results of two studies strongly suggest that implicit learning in AGL depends on the goal relevance of the to-be-learned dimension. Specifically, when only one of the two stimulus dimensions was relevant for their task (Experiment 1) participants learned the structure underlying the relevant, but not that of the irrelevant dimension. However, when both dimensions were relevant, both structures were learned (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that implicit learning occurs only in dimensions to which we are attuned. Based on the present results and on those of Eitam, Hassin, and Schul (2008) we suggest that focusing on goal relevance may provide new insights into the mechanisms underlying implicit learning.

Current theories of emotion perception posit that basic facial expressions signal categorically discrete emotions or affective dimensions of valence and arousal. In both cases, the information is thought to be directly “read out” from the face in a way that is largely immune to context. In contrast, the three studies reported here demonstrated that identical facial configurations convey strikingly different emotions and dimensional values depending on the affective context in which they are embedded. This effect is modulated by the similarity between the target facial expression and the facial expression typically associated with the context. Moreover, by monitoring eye movements, we demonstrated that characteristic fixation patterns previously thought to be determined solely by the facial expression are systematically modulated by emotional context already at very early stages of visual processing, even by the first time the face is fixated. Our results indicate that the perception of basic facial expressions is not context invariant and can be categorically altered by context at early perceptual levels.