Can valence and origin of emotional words influence the assessments of ambiguous stimuli in terms of warmth or competence?

Abstract

People tend to think that emotions influence the way they think in a spectacular way. We wanted to determine whether it is possible to prime the assessments of ambiguous stimuli by presenting emotion-laden words. We did not expect the differences in assessments that depend only on the emotional factors to be particularly large. Participants were presented with words differing in valence and origin of an affective state, but aligned for arousal, concreteness, length and frequency of use. Their first task was to remember a word. While keeping the word in mind, their second task was to guess by intuition whether the symbol was related to certain traits. Participants assessed objects represented by coding symbols on the scales of warmth or competence. We expected positive valence and automatic origin to promote higher ratings in terms of warmth and reflective origin to promote higher ratings in terms of competence. Positive valence appeared to boost assessments in terms of both warmth and competence, while the origin effect was found to be dissociative: automatic origin promoted intensity of warmth assessments and reflective origin intensity of competence assessments. The study showed an existing relation between emotional and social aspects of the mind, and therefore supports the conclusion that both domains may result from dual processes of a more general character.

The Affect Misattribution in the Interpretation of Ambiguous Stimuli in Terms of Warmth vs. Competence: Behavioral Phenomenon and Its Neural Correlates

“…Furthermore, in the present study, reflective words were causing a significantly higher competence than warmth assessments; this result is in accordance with previously proposed models of the duality of emotions [ 1 , 6 ] and previous experimental results [ 9 , 31 ] showing how deliberative, reflective processing is related to the competence dimension rather than warmth. However, there was no difference for assessments in warmth for words of different origin.…”

“…For the behavioral results, we partially confirmed our predictions: the stimuli of automatic origin elicited lower competence assessments compared to the stimuli of the reflective condition. This is particularly interesting, as this effect was not obtained in previous experiments [ 9 , 31 ]; the differences could be caused by the fact that, in the present study, we did not observe any interaction effect between the origin and valence (which occurred in previous experiments). Perhaps, we were able to study the main effect of origin without interlacing it with the valence effects, and thus we obtained different results because of the lack of disruption caused by the valence effects Nevertheless, it would be very much in line with the theoretical assumptions differentiating the relationships between the dualistic origin and social dimensions of warmth and competence [ 9 ].…”

“…The most important is that the experimental procedure was complex, based on two different stages. We were not able to create a single stage task, as is typical in EEG experiments, mostly because of the behavioral paradigm designed in earlier studies [ 1 , 9 , 31 ]. The three-stage analysis of ERP with different stimuli materials (words vs octagrams) did not allow us to cross-compare the effects inside the current experiment and limited the possibility of comparing the results with the literature.…”

“…These two modes are very well established in cognitive psychology; however, it seems that there can be a duality of processing also for the specifics of affective functioning on different dimensions [ 1 , 6 ]. For example, previous studies have found that the positive valence significantly increases the assessments on both dimensions of warmth and competence [ 31 ], whereas the origin has a dual influence—namely, the automatic origin was promoting higher assessments for warmth, and the reflective origin was causing higher assessments for competence [ 8 , 31 ]. Furthermore, the origin dimension alone influences the decision in an ambiguous task, with reflective words resulting in significantly longer reaction times than the automatic or unspecific origin [ 23 ].…”

The Role of the Valence, Arousing Properties and Subjective Significance of Subliminally Presented Words in Affective Priming

“…Among the reflective words, the effect was different, with positive words leading to assimilation, while the negative ones evoked contrast; ideograms after both the negative and positive words were evaluated as more positive than in the neutral condition (Imbir & Jarymowicz, 2013 ). A similar study conducted recently, using a procedure of evaluating neutral stimuli after the optimal presentation of words differing with valence and origin, showed the assimilation effect to occur for words with automatic and reflective origins (Imbir & Pastwa, 2021 ).…”