Significant others trigger bivalent-priming Running head: Significant others trigger bivalent-priming Love you? Hate you? Maybe it’s both: Evidence that significant others trigger bivalent-priming

Psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and intuition all suggest that human beings can be profoundly ambivalent about significant others. However, experimental psychology has commonly assessed automatic evaluations as either positive or negative, but not both simultaneously. Experiment 1 showed that activating the mental representation of a significant other facilitated the processing of both positive and negative information (bivalent-priming). In contrast, replicating past work, activating the mental representation of an object facilitated classification of only valence-congruent targets and inhibited classification of valenceincongruent targets (univalent-priming). Experiment 2 demonstrated that these results were not attributable to alternative accounts, such as arousal. The results support the long-held proposition that significant others automatically facilitate coactivation of positive and negative and that commonly used relative (good vs. bad) measures of automatic evaluation may not capture this affective complexity.