The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) has been forwarded as one of the most promising alternatives to the Implicit Association Test and the evaluative-priming task for measuring attitudes such as prejudice indirectly. We investigated whether the AMP is indeed able to detect an evaluative out-group bias. In contrast to recent conclusions about the robustness of AMP effects, six out of seven pilot studies indicated that participants did not show any prejudice effects in the AMP. Yet, these pilot studies were not fully conclusive with regard to our research question because they investigated different domains of prejudice, used small sample sizes, and employed a modified AMP version. In a preregistered, high-powered AMP study, we therefore examined whether the standard AMP does reveal prejudice against Turks, the biggest minority in Germany, and found a significant, albeit very small prejudice effect. We discuss possible reasons for the AMP's weak sensitivity to evaluations in socially sensitive domains.

How we mentally represent spatial relations is known to haveeffects on cognitive processes such as inferences, co-speechgesture, or memorizing. In addition, spatial positions oftenserve as metaphors that carry valence. For instance, “movingup the social ladder, “getting it right”, or being “in front” feelscertainly better than “moving down”, “having two left feet”,or “lagging behind”. Spatial position, however, depends onperspective, more concretely on which frame of reference(FoR) one adopts—and hence on cross-linguisticallydiverging preferences. What is conceptualized as “in front” inone variant of the relative FoR (e.g., translation) is “behind”under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do suchdiverging conceptualizations of an object’s location also leadto diverging evaluations? We tested this with speakers ofGerman, Chinese, and Japanese using an Implicit AssociationTest (IAT). Data from two studies suggest that acrosslanguages the object “in front of” another object is evaluatedmore positively than the one “behind”, and that both locationand evaluation depend on the adopted FoR. In other words:linguistically imparted FoR preferences appear to impact onevaluative processes.