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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

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Testing whether and when abstract symmetric patterns produce affective responses.

Marco Bertamini¹, Alexis Makin, Anna Pecchinenda

¹Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom. m.bertamini@liv.ac.uk

|July 11, 2013

Summary

Processing abstract symmetrical patterns can evoke positive or negative emotions. This emotional response occurs when the pattern

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Visual Perception
Affective Science

Background:

Symmetry is frequently associated with beauty and is readily detected by human observers.
The automatic affective responses to visual stimuli, particularly abstract patterns, are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether brief exposure to novel symmetrical patterns elicits automatic positive affect.
To determine if processing abstract symmetrical patterns can generate affective responses.

Main Methods:

A priming paradigm was employed using abstract patterns as primes in a pattern-word interference task.
Participants classified positive and negative valence words.
Seven experiments tested irregular patterns, vertical/horizontal reflectional symmetry, and 90-degree rotational symmetry, ensuring no repetition of patterns or words.

Main Results:

Affective congruence effects were observed for both types of pattern regularity.
This effect was contingent on observers classifying the pattern's regularity after responding to the word valence task.

Conclusions:

Processing abstract patterns, whether symmetrical or random, can engender positive or negative affect.
Attending to and classifying the regularity of a pattern is crucial for eliciting these affective responses.