Personalizing the IAT and the SC-IAT: Impact of idiographic stimulus selection in the measurement of implicit anxiety

Previous research on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has almost completely neglected stimuli effects caused by individual differences in concept representations. The present study describes a more person-centered idiographic approach (i.e., individualized stimulus word selection) in which stimuli are either selected from a list or freely associated by the participants. To investigate whether this method can be used to reduce unexplained variance and ameliorate the IAT-family’s psychometric properties, we conducted two experiments with a test–retest design using an anxiety–IAT as well as an anxiety- and a calmness–SC-IAT (a single category variant of the IAT). Personalizing stimulus selection had no effect on the measurement outcome, reliability, and correlations (implicit–explicit, implicit–implicit) of the IAT and SC-IAT when measuring implicit anxiety.