Meaning Established by Classical Conditioning: Failure to Replicate

Abstract

A classical conditioning procedure was used in which CS nonsense syllables were paired with UCS words of either positive, negative, or neutral evaluative meaning. Information presented to S concerning the nature of the task was designed to prevent awareness. of the 240 Ss serving in the experiment, 16 Ss revealed an awareness of the CS-UCS word pairings. These Ss were not included in the data analysis but were replaced by 16 other Ss who did not reveal awareness. Results indicated that there was no significant conditioning effect for any of the unaware Ss. Although the number of aware Ss was not large enough for meaningful statistical evaluation, it was noted that in many of the cases, the conditioned response was in the direction predicted for their respective experimental groups.