Psychophysiological evidence of response conflict and strategic control of responses in affective priming

This experiment investigated the role of conflict in the response and evaluative categorization systems in the affective congruency effect using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants completed a primed evaluative decision task in which the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was manipulated. The size of the affective congruency effect increased along with the proportion of congruent trials. ERP data identified the locus of this effect in the response system: the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) showed that preferential response activation occurred in motor cortex following prime onset, and the fronto-central N2 (conflict monitoring) component indicated that conflict occurred when the response activated by the prime differed from the target response, irrespective of the affective congruency of the prime and target. The extent of this conflict covaried with strategic processing of primes, as participants directed less attention to primes that were likely to elicit conflict. These data support a response conflict account of affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task and indicate that strategic control of attention is important in determining the extent to which conflict occurs.     

On the nature of the affective priming effect: Effects of stimulus onset asynchrony and congruency proportion in naming and evaluative categorization

In line with the hypothesis that affective priming of evaluative categorization responses is based on processes that operate at a response selection stage, it has been observed that increasing the proportion of congruent trials brings about increased affective priming effects at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in the evaluative categorization task. In the present study, we orthogonally manipulated the congruency proportion (.25, .50, and .75) and the SOA (0, 200, and 1,000 msec) in the evaluative categorization task and a naming task. Results showed that at both short and long SOAs, the affective priming effect in the evaluative categorization task was influenced by the congruency proportion. In contrast, affective priming effects in the naming task were unaffected by the congruency proportion at short SOAs. This pattern of results provides corroborating evidence for the hypotheses (1) that different processes underlie the affective priming effect in the evaluative categorization task and the naming task and (2) that valenced stimuli can automatically preactivate the memory representations of other, affectively related stimuli.     

评价分类任务中情绪启动效应的若干定理*

评价分类任务中的情绪启动效应有很多现象,如比例效应、反转效应、词频效应。到目前为止,任何一个启动模型均无法解释所有的情绪启动现象,表明现有的模型均有理论不足。为此提出了四条定理,实验一证实了启靶一致RT(一致性期待时)<启靶不一致RT(不一致性期待时)<启靶一致RT(不一致性期待时);实验二证实了“启—靶”反应从快到慢依次是:N(负)—N、P(正)—N、N—P、P—P;实验三证实了在评价分类任务中准确性判断与速度判断出现了实验性分离。使用这些定理可以解释所有的评价分类任务中的情绪启动现象。     

Affective processing in overwhelmed individuals: Strategic and task considerations

Previous research suggests that emotionally overwhelmed individuals (high affect intensity, intermediate attention to emotions, low clarity of emotions) attempt to counteract the influence of affective information. In five studies (ns=129, 177, 119, 339, 261), the current research found that task performance in overwhelmed individuals varied by current arousal and by whether affective influence occurred on evaluative versus non-evaluative tasks. Overwhelmed high current arousal participants exhibited decreased affective influence on evaluative tasks but increased affective influence on non-evaluative tasks. These results are consistent with the effects of active suppression of affective information, including ironic effects of monitoring for affective information. In contrast, overwhelmed low current arousal participants exhibited increased affective influence on evaluative tasks but decreased affective influence on non-evaluative tasks. These results are consistent with attentional avoidance of affective information. Overall, these results further suggest that overwhelmed individuals attempt to counteract the influence of affective information. Whether they are successful depends on their current arousal and how affect can influence performance.     

A time course analysis of the affective priming effect

The argument that automatic processes are responsible for affective/evaluative priming effects has been primarily based on studies that have manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; i.e., the interval between the onset of the prime and the onset of the target). Moreover, these SOA studies provide an insight in the time course of the activation processes underlying automatic affect/attitude activation. Based on a fine-grained manipulation of the SOA employing either the evaluative decision task (Experiment 1) and the pronunciation task (Experiment 2) we concluded that affective priming, and hence automatic affect activation, is based on fast-acting automatic processes. The results of Experiment 3 provide a valid explanation for an apparent discrepancy between the results of Experiments 1 and 2 and previous findings. Finally, the results of Experiment 3 support the prediction of Jarvis and Petty (1996) that affective priming effects should be stronger for participants who are more chronically engaged in conscious evaluations.     

Affective priming of nonaffective semantic categorization responses

Recent studies have shown that robust affective priming effects can be obtained when participants are required to categorize the targets on the basis of their valence, but not when participants are asked to categorize the targets on the basis of nonaffective features. On the basis of this pattern of results, it has been argued that affective priming is due to processes that operate at a response selection stage rather than to processes that operate at an encoding stage. We demonstrate (a) that affective priming of nonaffective semantic categorization responses can be obtained when participants assign attention to the affective stimulus dimension, and (b) that affective priming in the standard evaluative categorization task is strongly reduced when participants assign attention to nonaffective stimulus features. On the basis of these findings, we argue (a) that processes operating at an encoding stage do contribute to the affective priming effect, and (b) that automatic affective stimulus processing is reduced when participants selectively attend to nonaffective stimulus features.     

The combined effect of gaze direction and facial expression on cueing spatial attention

Empirical evidence shows an effect of gaze direction on cueing spatial attention, regardless of the emotional expression shown by a face, whereas a combined effect of gaze direction and facial expression has been observed on individuals' evaluative judgments. In 2 experiments, the authors investigated whether gaze direction and facial expression affect spatial attention depending upon the presence of an evaluative goal. Disgusted, fearful, happy, or neutral faces gazing left or right were followed by positive or negative target words presented either at the spatial location looked at by the face or at the opposite spatial location. Participants responded to target words based on affective valence (i.e., positive/negative) in Experiment 1 and on letter case (lowercase/uppercase) in Experiment 2. Results showed that participants responded much faster to targets presented at the spatial location looked at by disgusted or fearful faces but only in Experiment 1, when an evaluative task was used. The present findings clearly show that negative facial expressions enhance the attentional shifts due to eye-gaze direction, provided that there was an explicit evaluative goal present.     

The positivity proportion effect: A list context effect in masked affective priming

In the evaluative decision task, participants decide whether target words denote something positive or negative. Positive and negative prime words are known to engender so-called affective priming effects in this task. Primes were sandwich masked, and the proportion of positive to negative target words was manipulated. In Experiment 1, prime valence and positivity proportion interacted, so that primes of the less frequently presented target valence caused larger priming effects. Experiment 2 rendered an explanation of this interaction in terms of response bias unlikely, Experiment 3 ruled out a peripheral locus of the effect, and Experiment 4 ruled out an account in terms of stimulus repetition. The effect is explained by means of an attentional bias favoring the rare kind of valence.     

Priming effects on the N400 in the affective priming paradigm with facial expressions of emotion

We studied the effect of facial expression primes on the evaluation of target words through a variant of the affective priming paradigm. In order to make the affective valence of the faces irrelevant to the task, the participants were assigned a double prime–target task in which they were unpredictably asked either to identify the gender of the face or to evaluate whether the word was pleasant or unpleasant. Behavioral and electrophysiological (event-related potential, or ERP) indices of affective priming were analyzed. Temporal and spatial versions of principal components analyses were used to detect and quantify those ERP components associated with affective priming. Although no significant behavioral priming was observed, electrophysiological indices showed a reverse priming effect, in the sense that the amplitude of the N400 was higher in response to congruent than to incongruent negative words. Moreover, a late positive potential (LPP), peaking around 700 ms, was sensitive to affective valence but not to prime–target congruency. This pattern of results is consistent with previous accounts of ERP effects in the affective priming paradigm that have linked the LPP with evaluative priming and the N400 with semantic priming. Our proposed explanation of the N400 priming effects obtained in the present study is based on two assumptions: a double check of affective stimuli in terms of valence and specific emotion content, and the differential specificities of facial expressions of positive and negative emotions.     

Tracking hand movements captures the response dynamics of the evaluative priming effect

We tested the response dynamics of the evaluative priming effect (i.e. facilitation of target responses following evaluatively congruent compared with evaluatively incongruent primes) using a mouse tracking procedure that records hand movements during the execution of categorisation tasks. In Experiment 1, when participants performed the evaluative categorisation task but not the non-evaluative semantic categorisation task, their mouse trajectories for evaluatively incongruent trials curved more toward the opposite response than those for evaluatively congruent trials, indicating the emergence of evaluative priming effects based on response competition. In Experiment 2, implementing a task-switching procedure in which evaluative and non-evaluative categorisation tasks were intermixed, we obtained reliable evaluative priming effects in the non-evaluative semantic categorisation task as well as in the evaluative categorisation task when participants assigned attention to the evaluative stimulus dimension. Analyses of hand movements revealed that the evaluative priming effects in the evaluative categorisation task were reflected in the mouse trajectories, while evaluative priming effects in the non-evaluative categorisation tasks were reflected in initiation times (i.e. the time elapsed between target onset and first mouse movement). Based on these findings, we discuss the methodological benefits of the mouse tracking procedure and the underlying processes of evaluative priming effects.     

Boundary conditions for the influence of unfamiliar non-target primes in unconscious evaluative priming: The moderating role of attentional task sets

Evaluative priming by masked emotional stimuli that are not consciously perceived has been taken as evidence that affective stimulus evaluation can also occur unconsciously. However, as masked priming effects were small and frequently observed only for familiar primes that there also presented as visible targets in an evaluative decision task, priming was thought to reflect primarily response activation based on acquired S–R associations and not evaluative semantic stimulus analysis. The present study therefore assessed across three experiments boundary conditions for the emergence of masked evaluative priming effects with unfamiliar primes in an evaluative decision task and investigated the role of the frequency of target repetition on priming with pictorial and verbal stimuli. While familiar primes elicited robust priming effects in all conditions, priming effects by unfamiliar primes were reliably obtained for low repetition (pictures) or unrepeated targets (words), but not for targets repeated at a high frequency. This suggests that unfamiliar masked stimuli only elicit evaluative priming effects when the task set associated with the visible target involves evaluative semantic analysis and is not based on S–R triggered responding as for high repetition targets. The present results therefore converge with the growing body of evidence demonstrating attentional control influences on unconscious processing.     

About the impact of automaticity in the minimal group paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasks

Two experiments examined whether novel, minimal ingroups are automatically associated with positive affect while outgroups do not elicit such positive evaluative default. Participants were assigned to social categories in a typical minimal group setting and subsequently administered a masked priming task, i.e. prime words were not consciously recognized. Following either the presentation of a priori positive or negative words or the presentation of the group labels, participants classified adjectives with regard to their valence (positive/negative). In Experiment 1, a standard affective priming paradigm was realized with response latencies as dependent measures; in Experiment 2, a response window technique was used, with errors as crucial measure. In both studies, significant affective congruency effects emerged similarly for standard primes and category labels, indicating ingroup bias on an implicit level. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dissociative affective and associative priming effects in the lexical decision task: yes versus no responses to word targets reveal evaluative judgment tendencies

The affective priming effect (AP; i.e., shorter evaluative or lexical decision latencies for affectively congruent prime-target pairs) has often been interpreted as evidence for spreading activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. The present study emphasizes the view that in the lexical decision task, the prime-target configuration is implicitly evaluated as a question of the form "Is (prime) (target)?" (e.g., "Is death wise?") so that there is a tendency to affirm in cases of congruency and to negate in cases of incongruency. Therefore, after establishing the AP with the lexical decision task in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 the assignment of yes responses to words and nonwords was varied. For the word = yes condition, the AP emerged, whereas the data pattern was reversed for the word = no condition. In Experiment 3, a comparable pattern of results was not found for symmetrical or backward associatively related prime-target pairs.     

I like the sound of your voice: Affective learning about vocal signals

This paper provides the first demonstration that the content of a talker’s speech is sufficient to imbue the acoustics of his voice with affective meaning. In two studies, participants listened to male talkers utter positive, negative, or neutral words. Next, participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task where a neutral word spoken by one of talkers was presented before each target word to be evaluated. We predicted, and found, that voices served as evaluative primes influencing the speed with which participants evaluated the target words. These two experiments demonstrate that the human voice can take on affective meaning merely based on the positive or negative value words it has spoken. Implications for affective processing, the pragmatics of communication, and person perception are discussed.     

Does sunshine prime loyal … or summer? Effects of associative relatedness on the evaluative priming effect in the valent/neutral categorisation task

After 30 years of research, the mechanisms underlying the evaluative priming effect are still a topic of debate. In this study, we tested whether the evaluative priming effect can result from (uncontrolled) associative relatedness rather than evaluative congruency. Stimuli that share the same evaluative connotation are more likely to show some degree of non-evaluative associative relatedness than stimuli that have a different evaluative connotation. Therefore, unless associative relatedness is explicitly controlled for, evaluative priming effects reported in earlier research may be driven by associative relatedness instead of evaluative relatedness. To address this possibility, we performed an evaluative priming study in which evaluative congruency and associative relatedness were manipulated independently from each other. The valent/neutral categorisation task was used to ensure evaluative stimulus processing in the absence of response priming effects. Results showed an effect of associative relatedness but no (overall) effect of evaluative congruency. Our findings highlight the importance of controlling for associative relatedness when testing for evaluative priming effects.     

Hand Position and Response Assignment Modulate the Activation of the Valence‐Space Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is ubiquitous in language and thought, as we usually reason and talk about abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones via metaphorical mappings that are hypothesized to arise from our embodied experience. One pervasive example is the conceptual projection of valence onto space, which flexibly recruits the vertical and lateral spatial frames to gain structure (e.g., good is up ‐bad is down and good is right ‐bad is left ). In the current study, we used a valence judgment task to explore the role that exogenous bodily cues (namely response hand positions) play in the allocation of spatial attention and the modulation of conceptual congruency effects. Experiment 1 showed that congruency effects along the vertical axis are weakened when task conditions (i.e., the use of vertical visual cues, on the one hand, and the horizontal alignment of responses, on the other) draw attention to both the vertical and lateral axes making them simultaneously salient. Experiment 2 evidenced that the vertical alignment of participants’ hands while responding to the task—regardless of the location of their dominant hand—facilitates the judgment of positive and negative‐valence words, as long as participants respond in a metaphor–congruent manner (i.e., up responses are good and down responses are bad). Overall, these results support the claim that source domain representations are dynamically activated in response to the context and that bodily states are an integral part of that context.     

Contingency learning with evaluative stimuli: testing the generality of contingency learning in a performance paradigm

In two experiments, we tested the generality of the learning effects in the recently-introduced color-word contingency learning paradigm. Participants made speeded evaluative judgments to valenced target words. Each of a set of distracting nonwords was presented most often with either positive or negative target words. We observed that participants responded faster on trials that respected these contingencies than on trials that contradicted the contingencies. The contingencies also produced changes in liking: in a subsequent explicit evaluative rating task, participants rated positively-conditioned nonwords more positively than negatively-conditioned nonwords. Interestingly, contingency effects in the performance task correlated with this explicit rating effect in both experiments. In Experiment 2, all effects reported were independent of subjective and objective contingency awareness (which was completely lacking), even when awareness was measured at the item level. Our results reveal that learning in this type of performance task extends to nonword-valence contingencies and to responses different from those emitted during the performance task. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories about the processes that underlie contingency learning in performance tasks and for research on evaluative conditioning.     

Affective priming in the valent/neutral categorisation task is due to affective matching,not encoding facilitation: Reply to Spruyt

Spruyt obtained an affective congruency effect in a valent/neutral categorisation task, which contrasts with the absence of such an effect in the same task that was reported by Werner and Rothermund. The crucial difference between the two studies is that Spruyt presented only valent primes, whereas Werner and Rothermund presented equal amounts of valent and neutral primes and targets in their experiments. Removing the neutral primes introduces a confound of affective matches with the required response. Affective congruency effects in Spruyt's study can be explained straightforwardly in terms of such an affective matching strategy. To demonstrate the influence of matching strategies in the valent/neutral task without neutral primes, we conducted an experiment in which we induced an affective mismatching strategy. In support of our reasoning, this study revealed an affective incongruency effect in the valent/neutral categorisation task. We conclude that affective congruency as well as incongruency effects in the valent/neutral categorisation task reflect post-lexical affective (mis-)matching strategies rather than encoding facilitation.     

Contextual influences on implicit evaluation: a test of additive versus contrastive effects of evaluative context stimuli in affective priming

Drawing on two alternative accounts of the affective priming effect (spreading activation vs. response interference), the present research investigated the underlying processes of how evaluative context stimuli influence implicit evaluations in the affective priming task. Employing two sequentially presented prime stimuli (rather than a single prime), two experiments showed that affective priming effects elicited by a given prime stimulus were more pronounced when this stimulus was preceded by a context prime of the opposite valence than when it was preceded by a context prime of the same valence. This effect consistently emerged for pictures (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2) as prime stimuli. These results suggest that the impact of evaluative context stimuli on implicit evaluations is mediated by contrast effects in the attention to evaluative information rather than by additive effects in the activation of evaluative information in associative memory.