On Wildebeests and Humans

Abstract

On the basis of a functional perspective, we hypothesized that negative stimuli are detected faster than positive stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants were subliminally presented with positive and negative words or with no words at all. After each presentation, participants were asked whether they had seen a word. They detected negative words more accurately than positive words. In Experiment 2, participants were subliminally presented with negative or positive words. After each presentation, they were asked whether the presented word was positive or negative. Negative words were correctly categorized more often than positive words. Experiment 3 showed that although participants correctly categorized negative words more often than positive words. they could not guess the meaning of the words better than would be expected by chance. The results are discussed against the background of recent findings on basic affective processes.

Curvilinear relationship between phonological working memory load and social-emotional modulation

“…In contrast, stimulus-driven control over attentional resources can be seen as “hot”, indifferent to task demands, and effortless insofar as stimulus processing is “automatically” carried out to completion without conscious monitoring (Tzelgov, 1997). Such control is vital for rapid and preconscious appraisal of stimuli that have social, biological, or survival importance (e.g., emotional expressions on faces; Bargh, 1989; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2003; Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2001; Okon-Singer et al, 2007; Yantis, 2000). Though emotional stimuli may be task-irrelevant, they have the intrinsic potential to disrupt task-driven cognition by automatically absorbing attentional resources and reducing working memory capacity.…”

Nonconscious semantic processing of emotional words modulates conscious access

“…One recent line of study examined whether the emotional valence of words could be accessed nonconsciously. In a recent publication, Dijksterhuis and Aarts (17) showed that masked negative words could be categorized as negative above chance level, in contrast with positive words, even if subjects could not guess the meaning of the words. However, these results could be interpreted, at least in part, in terms of a systematic response bias that could not be ruled out in the absence of such detection measures as dЈ (18).…”

Time course of gender agreement violations containing emotional words

“…Word recall studies have shown that recall of emotional words is greater to that of neutral words, independently of whether words are semantically related or not (Ferr e, Fraga, Comesaña, & S anchez-Casas, 2014). Other techniques, such as Rapid Visual Serial Presentation (Anderson, 2005) and priming (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2003), have revealed effects related to the detection and recognition of emotional words using a length presentation of up to 13.3 ms. On balance, these findings show that emotionality is a complex issue, and that even though both pleasant and unpleasant words (i.e., words with high arousal ratings) are different from neutral ones, they are also different from each other.…”

“…Usually, these differences in the processing of emotional stimuli appear in later components, such as P200 Wang et al, 2013) or the Early Posterior Negativity (Citron, 2012;Scott et al, 2009). However, early differences have been reported in studies which used emotional words, be they behavioral, such as priming studies with pleasant and unpleasant words at a 13.3 ms presentation rate (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2003), or electrophysiological, which, as in our experiment, showed modulations in the amplitude of early components, such as P1 (Bernat et al, 2001;Scott et al, 2009;Wong et al, 2004) or N1 (Bernat et al, 2001;Hofmann et al, 2009). It is important to add that these electrophysiological studies used high arousal negative words, either as the only experimental condition or together with another condition which contained pleasant words.…”