Brief report Low positive affect and less extreme emotional encoding

Current theories suggest low positive affect (PA) should be associated with negative encoding of ambiguous information. However, recent findings (Lawson & MacLeod, 1999) paradoxically suggest that low positive affect may lead to less negative encoding. One possibility is that low positive affect is associated with less emotionally extreme encoding rather than less negative encoding. Undergraduates (22 Low PA, 23 High PA) read potentially negative and potentially positive ambiguous sentences followed by a word related to an emotional or a non‐emotional interpretation of the sentence, or by an unrelated word. Low PA participants demonstrated greater priming for neural interpretations, while High PA participations showed the opposite pattern. There was no interaction with valence, suggesting low positive affect may be related to encoding ambiguity as less emotionally extreme.