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Related Experiment Video

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The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content

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Published on: June 29, 2016

Attention please: no affective priming effects in a valent/neutral-categorisation task.

Benedikt Werner¹, Klaus Rothermund

¹Department of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany.

Cognition & Emotion

|August 3, 2012

Summary

Affective congruency effects may not stem from spreading activation. A new valent/neutral-categorisation task, avoiding response compatibility, found no affective congruency effects, challenging this theory.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Social Psychology
Affective Science

Background:

Affective congruency effects are typically explained by spreading activation or response competition.
Previous research using semantic categorization or naming tasks eliminated affective congruency effects, but these tasks also removed the need to process affective stimulus information.

Purpose of the Study:

To test the hypothesis that affective congruency effects require processing stimulus valence.
To differentiate between spreading activation and response competition as explanations for affective congruency.
To introduce and validate a novel valent/neutral-categorisation task.

Main Methods:

Developed a valent/neutral-categorisation task to isolate affective congruency from response compatibility.
Conducted two experiments using this new task to assess affective congruency effects.
Included a priming task with associated word pairs to confirm task sensitivity to spreading activation.

Main Results:

No affective congruency effect was observed in either experiment using the valent/neutral-categorisation task.
A significant priming effect for associated word pairs was found in Experiment 1, indicating the task can detect spreading activation.

Conclusions:

The findings disfavour a conditional spreading activation account for affective congruency effects.
The results suggest that affective congruency effects might not be mediated by valence processing alone.
The developed task is sensitive to spreading activation but does not yield affective congruency effects, necessitating a re-evaluation of existing theories.