Connections From Kafka Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

Travis Proulx; Steven J. Heine

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02414.x

Connections From Kafka

Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar

Travis Proulx1 and
Steven J. Heine2

¹University of California, Santa Barbara
²University of British Columbia

Address correspondence to Travis Proulx, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, e-mail: proulx{at}psych.ucsb.edu
to Steven J. Heine, 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4 Canada, e-mail: heine{at}psych.ubc.ca.

Abstract

In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one's own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.

Article Notes

↵¹All references to death and dying were removed to distinguish affirmation following from the absurd nature of the story and affirmation following from mortality-salience meaning threats (see Greenberg et al., 1992).
- Received October 24, 2008.
- Revision received January 25, 2009.