Action compatibility effects are hedonically marked and have incidental consequences on affective judgment.

Abstract

Recent results from Cannon, Hayes, and Tipper (2010) have established that the Action Compatibility Effect (ACE) is hedonically marked and elicits a genuine positive reaction. In this work, we aim to show that the hedonic marking of the ACE has incidental consequences on affective judgment. For this, we used the affective priming paradigm principle (for a review, see Musch & Klauer, 2003): participants have to respond, as quickly as they can, regarding the pleasantness or unpleasantness character of a target word. In the priming phase, we do not present an affective stimulus; however, we present two different graspable objects, one after the other. The handles of the graspable objects are shown either both on the same side (i.e., perceptual action compatibility) or not (i.e., perceptual action incompatibility). In addition, the orientation of the handles of the objects are either compatible (i.e., action compatibility) or not (i.e., action compatibility) with the response hand used for the word evaluation. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants responded faster to positive words after perceptual action compatibility and action compatibility (thus demonstrating the ACE) than after incompatibility conditions.

The role of affect and reward in the conflict-triggered adjustment of cognitive control

“…The results were taken as first empirical evidence for the aversive nature of conflicts. Comparable results have also been reported for action compatible common household objects (Brouillet et al, 2011). In a further study (Fritz and Dreisbach, in press) the authors investigated whether the aforementioned conflict priming effect was actually due to the affective valence inherent in conflict primes or simply due to a match of processing fluency between prime and target (since positive stimuli as well as congruent primes can be processed faster than negative stimuli and incongruent primes).…”

The Role of Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the Affective Evaluation of Conflict

“…We focused on task repetitions, as these most closely resemble the task conditions under which the affective signatures of conflict processing have previously been investigated (Brouillet, Ferrier, Grosselin, & Brouillet, 2011; Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012; Fritz & Dreisbach, 2013; Fritz & Dreisbach, 2014; Schouppe et al, 2015). If incongruent (relative to congruent) trials are indeed experienced as more negative, due to either their higher control demands (Botvinick, 2007) or lower outcome expectancy (Alexander & Brown, 2011; Silvetti et al, 2011), we expected these trials to elicit lower ACC activation during subsequent affectively matching negative picture presentations, but higher ACC activations during the presentation of affectively non-matching positive picture presentations, and vice versa for congruent trials.…”

“…In the wake of Botvinick (2007)’s proposal, a growing number of behavioral studies confirmed its first assumption, namely that cognitive conflicts appear to be experienced as aversive events (Brouillet, Ferrier, Grosselin, & Brouillet, 2011; Dignath & Eder, 2015; Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012; Fritz & Dreisbach, 2013, 2015; Schouppe et al, 2012; 2015; for a review, see Dreisbach & Fischer, 2015). For example, Dreisbach and Fischer (2012) investigated this by combining a classic color Stroop task (Stroop, 1935) with an affective priming paradigm (Fazio, 2001).…”

Monitoring and control in multitasking

“…First, conflict and errors trigger negative affect. The negative affective valence of errors (e.g., Aarts, De Houwer, & Pourtois, 2012 and of stimulus and response conflict has been demonstrated in several studies (e.g., Braem et al, 2017;Brouillet, Ferrier, Grosselin, & Brouillet, 2011;Dreisbach & Fischer, 2012a;Fritz & Dreisbach, 2013) and is discussed in several reviews (Botvinick, 2007;Dreisbach & Fischer, 2015, 2016Inzlicht, Bartholow, & Hirsh, 2015;Saunders et al, 2017;van Steenbergen, 2015).…”