Affect priming
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The intent of this affective priming paradigm had initially the intent of eliminating the bias created by affective priming research self-reports. As a consequence, Fazio created the affective priming paradigm, which focuses on the evaluation of automatic stimuli. One finding of studies that use this paradigm says that "performance is typically faster and more accurate when a prime and target are congruent and have the same emotional information (e.g., "flower"–"wedding") compared with when they are incongruent and have different emotional information (e.g., "party' –"corpse")."
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Affective automatic response
Affective priming has been long said to be related to implicit attitudes . Some research suggests that affective priming is triggered by multiple, simultaneous mechanisms. Added to this, it has found that deeper processing of the target being evaluated can significantly hinder the influence of the prime. On the other hand, deeper processing prime significantly increases the prime's influence and it is retrieved more easily in subsequent occasions.
There is still a great need of research related to affective priming and automatic processing. Some arguments in favor of a strong relationship between the two argue that these affective priming processes 1) lack intentionality, 2) are highly efficient, 3) have reduced controllability, 4) are triggered at a high speed, especially when there is a motivationally relevant stimulus, and 5) there is reduced awareness of the origin, meaning, and occurrence of the response.
Seib-Pfeifer and Gibbons have suggested that affective priming processing is linked to the right central-to-parieto-occipital positive slow wave (PSW).
Other factors that contribute to this relationship between affective priming and automatic processing include switching tasks, salience asymmetry, and potentially strategic recoding.
Valence vs arousal
There is much discussion in the world of psychology about the effects of valence and arousal in affect priming, since they both seem to affect it, but there has been little research on which of the two has a greater effect on this type of priming. For example, one study by Yao, Shu, and Luo asserts that valence has a greater effect, based on their findings regarding the stability of valence-driven priming effects against arousal-driven effects and their information in the semantic system.