Abstract: During the past two decades, the research of affective priming has been an important area in the region of western psychology. Much of research on attitude activation has employed various experimental tasks and methods, and the result of the intensive research implies that attitudes can be activated automatically. So far three kinds of models have been proposed: a spreading of activation account, a Stroop-like response conflict, an Affective-Matching mechanism. There is still debate over the results of different studies. Future researchers should focus their attention on the exploring of the interior mechanism of automatically evaluated activation, and so considerable progress can be expected in the studies of unconscious cognition on the affective priming.

Key words: affective priming, spreading activation account, stroop-like response conflict, affective-matching mechanism