We (Teresa Garcia-Marques, Instituo Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisbon, Portugal, and Diane Mackie, UC, Santa Barbara) have a long collaboration investigating the experience of familiarity, or the sense that something has been encountered before.

Ongoing research in the lab investigates the many consequences of our demonstration that familiarity is inherently positive, so that familiarity sometimes confers positivity and in turn positivity sometimes is misattributed as familiarity.

Claypool, H. Hall, C., Mackie, D.M., & Garcia-Marques, T. (2008). Positive mood,attribution, and the Illusion of familiarity, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 721-728.

Claypool, H. Hugenberg., K. Housley, M., & Mackie, D.M. (2007). Familiar eyes are smiling: On the role of familiarity in the perception of facial affect. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 856-866.

Garcia-Marques, T., Mackie, D.M., Claypool, H. M., & Garcia-Marques,L. (2004). Positivity can cue familiarity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 585-593.

Garcia-Marques, T. & Mackie, D.M. (2000). The positive feeling of familiarity: mood as an information processing regulation mechanism. In J. Forgas and H. Bless (Eds.), The message within: The role of subjective experiences in social cognition and behavior (pp. 240-261). Philadelphia: Psychology Press

Other current research continues to investigate the consequences of our findings that familiarity regulates the way social information is processed.

Moons, W.G., Mackie, D.M., & Garcia-Marques, T. (in press). The impact of repetition-induced familiarity on agreement with weak and strong arguments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Weisbuch, M. & Mackie, D.M. (in press) False fame, perceptual clarity, or persuasion? Flexible fluency attribution in spokesperson familiarity effects. Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Garcia-Marques, T. & Mackie, D.M. (2007) Familiarity impacts person impression. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 839-855.

Claypool, H.M., Mackie, D.M., Garcia-Marques, T., McIntosh, A., & Udal, A (2004). The effects of personal relevance and repetition on persuasive processing. Social Cognition, 22, 310-355.

Garcia-Marques, T. & Mackie, D.M. (2001). The feeling of familiarity as a regulator of persuasive processing. Social Cognition,19, 9-34.

Implicit and explicit evaluations

While he was a post-doc in the Social Evaluation Lab, BJ Rydell and I started to draw out some of the consequences of his demonstration that implicit and explicit attitudes could differ in valence. Since explicit attitudes form and change in response to the valence of consciously accessible, verbally presented behavioral information about the target and implicit attitudes form and change in response to subliminally presented associations about the object, incongruent implicit and explicit evaluations can sometimes attach to the same object. Current research focuses on the consequences of these discrepancies.

Rydell, R.J., McConnell, A. & Mackie, D.M. (2008). Consequences of discrepant explicit and implicit attitudes: Cognitive dissonance and increased information processing. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1526-1532.

McConnell, A.R., Rydell, R.J., & Mackie, D.M. (2008). Social group association cues: Forming implicit and explicit attitudes toward Individuals, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 792-807.

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