Nulidad del contrato

While some people have conceivably studied parenting advice sources and thought carefully and at length about how to raise their children, it is likely that most fathers don’t ascribe to or have a theory of discipline or parenting, including the majority of those sampled in this research. Rather, most fathers simply react when their children misbehave, responding in the moment of the behaviour according to their attitudes and current emotional state. Their attitudes may have been shaped by many influences – their own upbringing and the beliefs and actions of their parents, their partner’s parenting attitudes and decisions, the way members of their peer group tend to raise their children, and so forth. Additionally, a father’s model of what “fatherhood” and parenting are may be influenced by the evolutionary history of fatherhood – implicit attitudes and actions relating to the roles ancestral fathers held for generations.

The question of whether we can use priming to change these attitudes is an important one to consider, given that this is an easily applied, cheap, universally accessible intervention. Exactly how that priming should be carried out – including what content the primes should contain, how they are presented, and how unforeseen changes may impact the priming effect, are also important questions to consider. It appears that in the form priming took in this

experiment, consistent and expected cognitive and behavioural changes were not achieved in the way predicted prior to the experiment taking place. This is despite a measurable priming effect being achieved for all groups.

The most likely explanation for this finding is that a singular priming exposure was insufficient to cause demonstrable behavioural and cognitive changes in belief, and that in the circumstances most analogous to this experiment – voting and advertising – changes in brand attitudes, purchasing behaviour, and voting decisions are the result of repeated priming

exposures leading to schematic changes in attentive individuals. Priming has been demonstrated to cause a cognitive effect in terms of activating a schema – this was successfully demonstrated by a word completion task in this experiment. However, altering schemas and therefore attitudes and behaviours relating to that schema in a consistent, significant way may require more than a

118

singular priming exposure to consistently produce change across many diverse but interested and attentive individuals.

The second strong possibility for explaining these findings is that the measure of change caused by the priming was insufficient, for one of several reasons. The most significant was that participants were asked to imagine their child misbehaving and rate their likely thoughts and actions in this situation. While most participants were very likely to be as honest as possible, there is a good chance that rating thoughts and behaviours in response to an imagined, abstract misbehaviour may obtain different results than if the participants had been measured actually reacting to their child misbehaving in real time. This was impractical to achieve in reality for this particular project, but may have contributed to the failure to find a consistent expected change in attributions and behaviours despite a measurably significant priming effect occurring.

One attitude change that was demonstrated in this experiment was that exposure to repeated negative thoughts and negative imagined scenarios of their child misbehaving appeared to have the ability to significantly increase father’s blaming attributions regarding their child’s misbehaviour. This, at least, shows that when a father focuses on the negative aspects of his child’s behaviour his thought patterns about his child can change in a negative way. This finding has two important implications; that researchers should be attuned to potentially minor factors contributing to unexpected outcomes in ways that were not foreseen in the experimental design process, and which may have obliterated or altered the priming effect changes caused by the priming images. And, with specific reference to the finding regarding blaming attributions in this experiment, that a focus on negative elements of a child’s behaviour can contribute to negative thought patterns about the child in general in a parent. Therefore, parenting interventions should focus on emphasising the positive outcomes of kind, thoughtful, calm parenting rather than emphasising the negative outcomes of harsh parenting as well as highlighting a child’s strengths rather than focusing entirely on addressing troublesome behaviour.

119

Overall, this research demonstrated that priming a fathering or parenting schema is possible with complex colour images of fathers interacting with their children. I argue that this was a successful demonstration of the enduring nature of a priming effect under some

conditions. The content of the primes appeared less important than how personally meaningful the primes were, and although there was some effect based on whether the affective primes were negative or positive in their emotional content, this did not significantly impact the priming effect itself. While a single priming intervention was sufficient to activate a relevant schema, it either was not powerful enough to effect consistent schematic changes and result in consistent and predictable attitude and behavioural change, or our method of trying to capture these changes was inadequate. Potentially, some combination of these factors was responsible for the outcomes observed. However, an illustration of how stimuli presented to participants with the intention of being a measure can potentially become a priming stimulus in and of itself was achieved. This highlights the sensitivity and complexity of human cognitive systems, and also points to the danger of negative, personally meaningful information in any form overriding other, more intentionally presented stimuli to cause unintended cognitive changes. The consequences of these changes may be fleeting and small, at least in singular dosages as presented here, but they are nevertheless meaningful in terms of the impact this may have on children when interacting with their parents.

Finally, it should be realised that affective priming is considered to be an adjunctive intervention, most useful when used alongside specific parenting interventions to strengthen any intended effects. It is also likely to be useful only for a small subset of parents who feel quite negatively, and perhaps also behave quite harshly, towards their children. For this small subset affective priming may be helpful when added to whichever parenting intervention they are undertaking. However, the form this priming takes should be carefully considered in light of the findings that unexpected cognitive changes can occur without foresight from the person

applying the priming, that calmly and rationally considered misbehaviour might be quite differently experienced by parents than actual misbehaviour occurring when emotions are

120

running high, and that personally meaningful primes appear more powerful than primes with generic content, even when that content is highly relevant to fathers as a group overall.

Affective priming in the exact form that it was carried out in this study did not produce the kind of consistent and enduring cognitive and behavioural changes we hoped to find with a sample of fathers; however, nonetheless it was demonstrated that fathers can be successfully primed with complex colour images, with these primes activating fathering-relevant schemas. With consideration of the results of this experiment and the proposed reasons I believe we obtained the outcomes that we did, it is very possible that affective priming might yet be a useful adjunctive clinical intervention for fathers struggling with how to warmly and effectively parent their children, particularly those who self-identify problems with emotional connection and positive relationships with their children. Further research, which takes into account the implications, unexpected and yet interesting findings, and limitations of this project, is required to further clarify whether affective priming is worth persisting with in this context. If so, how it might look should be carefully considered based on the design-related findings of this research, but a springboard from which to make these explorations has been achieved.

121