A researcher subliminally flashes words that have either emotionally positive content (for example, puppies, people embracing) or negative content (for example, murder, accidents) immediately before showing participants pictures of houses. Then, when they are asked to rate the houses in terms of attractiveness, the participants should:

give the houses that follow positive content images higher ratings.

Explanation:

When presented with two or more different stimulus that they're not familiar with, people have the tendency to form a correlation between the stimulus.

In the example above,

When the researchers show images of puppies or people embracing right before they show the image of the house, the participant of the studies will most likely associate the house with things that brought them happiness.  

This will explain why they give the houses that follow positive content images higher ratings.

unless they converted, many non-christians (mainly jews and muslims) were persecuted

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