When do motor behaviors (mis)match affective stimuli? An evaluative coding view of approach and avoidance reactions

Affective-mapping effects between affective stimuli and lever movements are critically dependent upon the evaluative meaning of the response labels that are used in the task instructions. In Experiments 1 and 2, affective-mapping effects predicted by specific-muscle-activation and distance-regulation accounts were replicated when the standard response labels towards and away were used but were reversed when identical lever movements were labeled downwards and upwards. In Experiment 3, affective-mapping effects were produced with affectively labeled right and left lever movements that are intrinsically unrelated to approach and avoidance. Experiments 4 and 5 revealed that affective-mapping effects are not mediated by memory retrieval processes and depend on the execution of affectively coded responses. The results support the assumption that evaluative implications of action instructions assign affective codes to motor responses on a representational level that interact with stimulus evaluations on a response selection stage.     

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.     

Is affective material in attitudes more accessible than cognitive material? The moderating role of attitude basis

Verplanken, Hofstee, and Janssen (1998) found that the affective component of attitude is accessed more readily than the cognitive. Three studies further examined these findings in the light of two competing explanations: affective primacy, which states that emotional material is inherently more accessible than cognitive; and evaluative primacy, which states that emotional material is more accessible only if it is inherently more evaluative or supports the overall evaluative basis of attitude. Study 1 measured the accessibility of cognitive and affective traits while equalizing the evaluative nature of these traits. This study found a speed advantage for affective traits, but the attitude objects in this study turned out to be mainly affectively based. Studies 2 and 3, using a mixture of affectively and cognitively based objects, found that the speed advantage for affective terms was only found among affectively based objects; Study 3 also found a speed advantage for cognitive terms among cognitively based objects, and additionally found that individual differences in attitude basis explained part of this interaction. Collectively, these studies show that while affective material may be accessed more quickly than cognitive, this is most true when overall evaluation is based on affect rather than cognition. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Automatic non-associative semantic priming: episodic affective priming of naming responses

Affective priming for associatively unrelated prime-target pairs was investigated using (a) the naming task, (b) a short stimulus onset asynchrony (250 ms), and (c) primes that had acquired their affective connotation during a differential evaluative conditioning procedure. Despite the fact that the primes and the targets were related on the affective dimension only, significant priming emerged. This finding indicates that mere affective overlap is sufficient to produce automatic priming. As such, our results are in line with theoretical accounts of automatic priming that are based on semantic relatedness.     

Implicit affective evaluation of visual symmetry

Symmetry and beauty are strongly linked, but is the positive response to visual symmetry automatic? We used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure the valence of visual regularities in the absence of overt judgments. In our first experiment, participants classified dot patterns as random or having an axis of reflection, and words as positive or negative. When the same button was used to report reflection and positive words, responses were faster than when the same button was used to report reflection and negative words. We take this association to indicate an implicit preference for reflectional patterns. In subsequent experiments, a reflected pattern was preferred to a rotation or translation, and a rotational pattern was preferred to random patterns. In some cases these results were not in agreement with verbally reported preferences, but implicit preferences were always predicted by the speed at which patterns could be identified. We conclude that the IAT can unearth an automatic affective response produced by perceptual fluency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Strength of affective reaction as a signal to think carefully

Analytic processes reduce biases, but it is not known how or when these processes will be deployed. Based on an affective signal hypothesis, relatively strong affective reactions were expected to result in increased analytic processing and reduced bias in judgement. The valence and strength of affective reactions were manipulated through varying outcomes in a game or evaluative conditioning of a stimulus. Relatively strong positive or negative affective reactions resulted in less desirability bias. Bias reduction only occurred if participants had time to deploy analytic processes and indicators of the degree of analytic processing (in the form of attentional control) predicted less bias. Affective processes have long been acknowledged as a source of bias, but these findings suggest affective processes are also integral to bias reduction.     

Measuring evaluative conditioning using the Implicit Association Test

When a neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus that has strong affective properties, these properties often appear to be transferred to the neutral stimulus. This learning has been termed evaluative conditioning. In two experiments, participants first learned the ‘meanings’ of four non-words. Two of these meanings were affectively positive, and two were affectively negative. Transfer of affect was measured in the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the IAT, a participant’s affective response to an item is inferred from his or her ability to categorise that item with other pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. An item easily categorised with other liked stimuli is deemed to be liked itself. In both experiments, evidence for transfer of affect was observed in the IAT. Thus, non-words given pleasant meanings in training (evaluative conditioning) were more easily categorised with pleasant than unpleasant personality characteristics, compared to non-words given unpleasant meanings. The results suggest that the IAT is a useful way to test for evaluative conditioning. It is both sensitive to the transfer of affective properties from one stimulus to another, and, because affect is measured indirectly, the results are unlikely to be due to the demand characteristics of the experiment.     

On the interdependence of cognition and emotion

Affect and cognition have long been treated as independent entities, but in the current review we suggest that affect and cognition are in fact highly interdependent. We open the article by discussing three classic views for the independence of affect. These are (i) the affective independence hypothesis, that emotion is processed independently from cognition, (ii) the affective primacy hypothesis, that evaluative processing precedes semantic processing, and (iii) the affective automaticity hypothesis, that affectively potent stimuli commandeer attention and evaluation is automatic. We argue that affect is not independent from cognition, that affect is not primary to cognition, nor is affect automatically elicited. The second half of the paper discusses several instances of how affect influences cognition. We review experiments showing affective involvement in perception, semantic activation, and attitude activation. We conclude that one function of affect is to regulate cognitive processing.     

Locational uncertainty moderates affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task

Affective congruency effects are often investigated using the evaluative decision task. It was predicted that uncertainty about the location of stimulus presentation moderates the strength of affective congruency effects in this task. In line with this hypothesis, effects of affective congruency were observed in two experiments only if locational uncertainty about the target location required participants to distribute their attention evenly over the visual field. Inducing certainty about the target location allowed participants to narrow their attentional focus and to suppress the influence of irrelevant distractor words. The results suggest that affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task are not exclusively based on automatic processes, but also depend on a strategic and flexible allocation of attention.     

Activation of Political Attitudes: A Psychophysiological Examination of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis

The recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain has allowed for a better understanding of human sensory and cognitive processing. This technique may also prove useful in studying implicit social attitudes and their effects on information processing. Here, ERPs were used in a study of "hot cognition" in the context of political concepts. Hot cognition, as applied to the political domain, posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively charged, and that this affective charge is automatically activated from long-term memory within milliseconds of presentation of the political stimulus. During an evaluative priming task, ERP recordings showed that affectively incongruent prime/target pairs elicited an enhanced negativity with a peak latency of about 400 milliseconds relative to affectively congruent prime/target pairs. These differences suggest that automatic, implicit evaluations were made in response to strongly positive and negative political stimuli, and that these evaluations affected the subsequent processing of a high-valence adjective. Therefore, it appears that the emotional valence of a political prime is stored along with the concept itself, and that an affective response becomes active upon mere exposure to the political stimulus.     

Reversing the affective congruency effect: The role of target word frequency of occurrence

In this research the outcome of an affective priming experiment is shown to critically depend on the frequency of occurrence of the target words used. Low frequency target words (5.7 occurrences per million words) resulted in an affective congruency effect, i.e., faster responses following affectively congruent than incongruent primes. High frequency target words (32.6 occurrences per million) resulted in a reverse priming effect, i.e., faster responses following incongruent than congruent primes. The size of the congruency effect was larger than the size of the reverse priming effect, thus masking its emergence when word frequency was not taken into account. We propose that target word frequency has its influence via an accessibility-related mechanism having to do with differences in observed changes in affect between prime and target.     

不同SOA条件下的情感启动效应研究

在150ms和250ms两种SOA条件下,以彩色图片为启动刺激,以汉语双字词为目标刺激,通过评价分类任务考察情感启动效应。结果表明在两种SOA条件下均存在显著的情感启动效应;积极启动和消极启动对目标词产生了不同的影响。类似Stroop效应的反应冲突机制可解释本研究所获得的结果。     

Cross-modal attention capture by affective stimuli: Evidence from event-related potentials

The P3 component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an acoustic startle probe is modulated during picture viewing, with reduced P3 amplitude when participants view either pleasant or unpleasant, as opposed to neutral, pictures. We have interpreted this as reflecting capture of attentional resources by affective pictures, with fewer resources available for processing the secondary startle probe. In the present study, we tested this resource allocation hypothesis by presenting either pictures or sounds as foreground stimuli, with the prediction that P3 amplitude in response to secondary startle probes would be reduced for affectively engaging foregrounds regardless of modality. Using dense-array electroencephalography and a source estimation procedure, we observed that P3 amplitude was indeed smaller when startle probes were presented during emotional, as opposed to neutral, stimuli for both sound and picture foregrounds. Source modeling indicated a common frontocentral maximum of P3 modulation by affect. The data support the notion that emotionally arousing stimuli transmodally attract resources, leading to optimized processing of the affective stimuli at the cost of the processing of concurrent stimuli.     

Affective biasing of choices in gambling task decision making

The proponents of the somatic marker hypothesis presume that rational decision making is guided by emotional reactions that are developed from prior experience. Supporting evidence for the hypothesis comes almost exclusively from the short-term affective reactions that are learned during the course of a hypothetical decision-making task—the gambling task (GT). We examined GT performance and affective reactions to choices when those choices were biased by words that had preexisting affective value. In one experiment, affectively valued words directly signaled good and bad choices. A congruent relation between affective value of word and choice outcome improved GT performance, whereas an incongruent relation greatly interfered with performance. In another experiment, affectively valued words were maintained as a working memory (WM) load between GT choices. A WM load with affectively positive words somewhat improved GT performance, whereas affectively negative words interfered with performance. Somatic markers—indicated by differential anticipatory skin conductance response (SCR ) amplitude for good and bad choices—appeared at a point in the GT session when choice performance was superior. However, differential SCR developed during the session after good choice performance was already established. These results indicate that preexisting affective biases can influence GT decision making. In addition, the somatic markers that are regular accompaniments of GT decision making appeared to be temporally lagging indicators of choice performance. 2006 Psychonomic Society, Inc.     

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 replicability of the affective priming effect in the pronunciation task

Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, and Hymes (1996) and Hermans, De Houwer, and Eelen (1994) showed that a valenced target word is pronounced faster after the presentation of an affectively related prime word than after the presentation of an affectively unrelated prime word. This finding is important because it provides crucial evidence for the hypotheses that stimulus evaluation (a) is goal-independent and (b) facilitates the encoding of stimuli that have the same valence. However, recent studies indicate that the affective priming effect is not a reliable finding in the standard pronunciation task. We report the results of a nearly exact replication of Bargh et al.'s (1996) Experiment 2. In line with previous replication studies, we failed to detect the affective priming effect.     

Measuring affective clarity indirectly: individual differences in response latencies of state

This research investigated a new method to measure momentary affective clarity indirectly, which is based on latencies of responses to state affect items. Three studies revealed that this indirect measure of momentary clarity demonstrated high reliability and stability as well as convergent and predictive validity. The indirect measure was associated with dispositional clarity when the concept of clarity was activated before measuring response latencies (Studies 1 and 2) and was related to self-reports of momentary clarity (Study 3). Furthermore, Study 3 demonstrated that indirectly measured clarity decreased after an affectively complex film. Indirectly, but not directly, measured momentary clarity predicted a more positive affective state at the end of the study. This effect was mediated by affect regulation.     

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.     

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.     

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.