Changing gender roles and a different emphasis
on what it means to be a father in New Zealand
have contributed to fathers being required to
play a new, more involved role in their children’s
lives. For many fathers today, contributing to
decisions and application of discipline for bad
behaviour is an important part of their parenting
role. Research suggests that children benefit from
consistent disciplinary routines. However, the
attitude in New Zealand is that harsh discipline,
particularly of a physical nature, is undesirable
and needs to be discouraged. An important area
for investigation is ways parenting decisions can
be influenced in a positive direction, using simple
psychological techniques that are easy to apply in
the real world. Positive affective priming involves
exposing people to stimuli, or primes, in order to
influence their thoughts, emotions and behaviours
in a specified direction. A potential practical
application of positive affective priming may
be in clinical use with fathers to influence their
disciplinary choices in response to a child’s bad
behaviour, in a positive (less harsh) direction. This
paper considers the literature relevant to the use of
positive affective priming for this purpose.
