[Does Emotional Context Affect Subliminal and Supraliminal Priming?]

Emotions are complex psychophysiological changes experienced during the interactions of internal and external processes. The stimuli that have emotional value have processing efficiency both in encoding and retrieval processes with respect to the neutral stimuli. Processing advantage is present also for implicit memory. Priming effect does not require conscious recollection and leads to changes in responding due to previous exposure to the stimulus. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the effect of presentation type and different emotional contexts on the priming.

Sixty-volunteered-university-students were (Female: n=40, X age=19.03±1.23; Male: n=20, X age=19.70±1.92) randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. Presentation type (Subliminal and Supraliminal) was between subject and Emotional Context (pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures) was within subject independent variables. Dependent variables were Word Stem Completion score and completion latencies.

Unpleasant emotional context had more capacity to create priming effect than the other emotional contexts. Both Subliminal and Supraliminal conditions favored the priming. Controversially to the transfer appropriate processing approach, the priming effect that was produced by supraliminal condition significantly higher than the priming created by the subliminal condition.

Unpleasant picture context produced more priming due to reason that evolutionarily important, i.e. thread-related, stimuli have processing priority and they capture the attention, utilize other cognitive resources easily. Even in priming, that is a phenomenon based heavily on data driven processes, concept driven processes are also effectual as indicated by levels-of-processing approach.