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CHAPTER 7 170 that they would feel fearful, no further steps were performed. Fear at that step was rated on a 0 - 100 scale. The BAT steps consisted of leaving the cart at the starting point (0), pulling the cart to various distances (1-6) and all the way toward the participant (7), touching, lifting, and opening the jar (8-10), touching the spider with a pen (11), with a finger (12), and taking the spider out of the jar (13). If, during the initial BAT, the participant was able to pull the spider to step 6 (50 cm), the BAT was repeated from the start with the jar opened. Affective priming task (APT) E Prime 2.0 software (Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2002) on a laptop (17” screen) was used to present the APT. Participants were asked to categorize 12 different words (targets; six positive [e.g., humor] and six negative [e.g., liar] as used in an APT by Engelhard, Leer, Lange, and Olatunji [2014]) as quickly and accurately as possible by pressing ‘p’ for a positive word, and ‘q’ for a negative word (Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986). Targets were presented 100 ms after offset of a picture (prime), which was shown for 200 ms. Participants were told that the pictures were included to make the task more difficult, and to focus on the word. Primes were four pictures of neutral objects (outlet, iron, key ring, and light bulb) and four pictures of spiders selected from a pilot study 1 . Targets and primes were semi-randomly presented, so that no similar combination of picture type (e.g., spider) and word type (e.g., negative word) was presented on two consecutive trials. Each picture preceded each word once, leading to a total of 96 trials, with a break in the middle. Before the actual APT, the task was practiced with three other negative and positive targets and a neutral prime. Target categorization speed was used as a dependent variable and implicit measure of spider fear (De Houwer, Teige- Mocigemba, Spruyt, & Moors, 2009), because it gives an indirect index of the prime’s valence. Target categorization is relatively fast after a prime with a congruent valence 1 More detailed information is available on request from the first author.