Baars et al. consider there to be three separate interpretations of the Freudian slip hypothesis--

1. Semantic Priming: Slips that express some idea are made more often when that idea has been presented before in different words.

2. Situational Priming: Motivationally salient situations are able to increase the rate of slips that express the motivated state of mind.

3. Psychodynamics: A tendency to avoid expressing some primed taboo thought will increase the probability of slips that express the taboo thought.

Testing these hypotheses--

1. Semantically-related words induced three times as many speech errors in a phonological bias task.

Ex: hearing "salary scale" primed the following speech error:

rage weight ® wage rate

2. Situations involving sexual attraction or the possibility of electric shock induced a greater number of corresponding speech errors:

lice legs ® nice legs

shad bok ® bad shock

3. The third hypothesis was tested in two steps:

A. Establishing a measure of "sexual guilt"

Subjects were asked to agree or disagree with the statements like the following:

Sex relations before marriage ruin many a happy couple.

Unusual sexual practices are immature.

Obscene literature is detrimental to society.

etc.

A high proportion of agreements was taken to represent a high degree of sexual guilt.

In previous studies, high-guilt subjects tend to:

1. Make very few sexual associations with double entendres like 'screw'

2. Deny being aroused when listening to erotic stories.

Þ High-guilt subjects tend to avoid expressing sexual thoughts, as long as they have voluntary control over their responses.

B. Subjects went through the sexual situational priming experiment.

High-guilt subjects (involuntarily!) made three times as many sex-related speech errors.