The study employed an experimental design over a 6 month period with 34 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction.
The study employed an experimental design over a 12 week period with 26 students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction.
In the instructed group, participants were asked to form positive sentence and avoid the negative alternative in the emotional blocks.
As anticipated, participants avoided negative sentences in the spontaneous group (25% negative sentences, logistic regression z = −11, p<0.001) as well as in the instructed group (0.5% negative sentences).
A first group was simply told to form grammatically correct sentences, eliciting the spontaneous avoidance of the negative alternative (spontaneous group); a second group, in contrast, was explicitly instructed to avoid forming negative sentences (instructed group).
However, WMC scores did predict the proportion of well-formed sentences (negative or positive) formed in the task (z = 3.8, p<0.001), both in the spontaneous (z = 3.5) and in the instructed group (z = 2.7).
By contrast, significantly fewer participants in the instructed group endorsed these beliefs (chi square ps < .001), instead they predominately endorsed the ' equally likely' statement in each stimulus.
While the non-instructed group showed a standard PIT effect (where the beer and chocolate stimuli primed the beer and chocolate response, respectively), this PIT effect was absent in the instructed group.
In the transfer test, the instructed group was told: 'In this part of the task, you can earn beer and chocolate by pressing the left or right arrow key in the same way as before.
On closer examination of the instructed group, it was found that two participants endorsed the hierarchical 'more likely' statement in the beer stimulus, two endorsed this belief in the chocolate stimulus, and one endorsed this belief in both stimuli.
