Well‐being and the accessibility of pleasant and unpleasant concepts

Abstract

The trait–congruency hypothesis predicts that persons high in positive or negative trait affect more readily process pleasant or unpleasant stimuli, respectively. In two studies, participants were administered measures of personality and affect. Moreover, a yes/no lexical decision task with pleasant, unpleasant and neutral words was administered in Study 1, whereas a go/no‐go task was used in Study 2. Several methods to increase reliabilities of differences in reaction times are explored. Correlations of measures of personality and trait affect with decision times were mostly consistent with the trait–congruency hypothesis, particularly for decision times in the go/no‐go task that measured individual differences in valence‐specific decision times more reliably. The findings suggest that trait‐related concept accessibility is one source of trait congruity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

tert‐Butylcarbamate‐Containing Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors: Apoptosis Induction, Cytodifferentiation, and Antiproliferative Activities in Cancer Cells

“…The average percentage of error trials among the remaining participants ( N = 46) was low ( M = 3.06, SD = 2.62). Following recommendations by Borkenau and Mauer (2007), attention indices were calculated with individually trimmed mean latencies: Each participant's 10% slowest responses were considered outliers. The internal consistency of the injustice‐related attention index, determined by difference scores for the two test blocks, was low (α = .34) but considerably higher than those usually reported for the visual probe task or reaction time measures in general (cf.…”

“…The internal consistency of the injustice‐related attention index, determined by difference scores for the two test blocks, was low (α = .34) but considerably higher than those usually reported for the visual probe task or reaction time measures in general (cf. Borkenau & Mauer, 2007; Schmukle, 2005).…”

“…As shown in our studies, in situations containing injustice‐related cues, a differential activation of injustice concepts is triggered in dependence on JS. However, concept activation due to negative stimuli, in general, should be independent of JS, but should rather depend on general affectivity (Borkenau & Mauer, 2007). A comprehensive test of this aspect of the domain specificity of processes involved in JS is indeed important because recent findings in social justice research may cast doubt on the assumption of a fully specific cognitive domain of injustice.…”

“…The availability and accessibility of injustice concepts should affect the processing of justice‐related information and not of information unrelated to justice issues. This domain specificity should clearly distinguish JS from more general personality traits, such as negative affectivity or neuroticism, which have been shown to shape processing of generally negative information (Borkenau & Mauer, 2007; for a review, see Rusting, 1998). Thus, we predicted that, after witnessing injustice, persons high in JS should attend more strongly to unjust stimuli than persons low in JS and not to negative stimuli unrelated to injustice (Study 1).…”

Emotional categorization: Individual emotional differences and laterality effects in healthy and persons with multiple sclerosis

“…[12][13][14] see also [6]). For example, it has been shown that typical happy people perceive, categorize, and retrieve pleasant information more readily, more easily than typical unhappy people, and may even interpret ambiguous stimuli more favorably [15,16]. In the same manner, an anxiety-related responses bias [17] and also an attention bias resulting in interpretation of ambiguous stimuli as threatening ones have been noticed in typical anxious individuals [18].…”