Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 31, 2026

Tickling, a Technique for Inducing Positive Affect When Handling Rats
Published on: May 8, 2018
Positive affective priming decreases the middle late positive potential response to negative images
Lauren D Hill1, Valerie G Starratt1, Mercedes Fernandez1
1Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Introduction:
This study aims to expand on previous literature showing that incidental emotion state priming in a specific domain leads to a higher probability that the primed emotion domain will be activated during a subsequent task.
Methods:
To that end, we investigated the influence of happy, fearful, and neutral incidental emotion state priming on subsequent responses to emotionally negative and neutral pictures, measured by the event-related potential (ERP) late positive potential (LPP). New to our study, we examined the influence of affective priming on the LPP response (analyzed separately at early and middle latency ranges) to emotional pictures in both the foveal and extrafoveal presentation locations.
Results:
Following both fearful and neutral incidental state priming, both the early and middle LPP latency ranges overwhelmingly differentiated between negative and neutral pictures. Following happy incidental state priming, however, the LPP response failed to differentiate between negative and neutral pictures by the middle LPP latency range (800-1,000 ms). These results suggest that incidental happy states can have a protective effect when viewing aversive stimuli. Additionally, the LPP showed greater sensitivity to negative stimuli when presented extrafoveally compared to foveally.
Conclusions:
Overall, our findings suggest that incidental affective state and stimulus location influence emotional processing differentially for emotionally negative and emotionally neutral stimuli.
Related Concept Videos
Positive, Negative, and Zero Work
Positive and Negative Feedback Loops
Position-effect Variegation
Position and Displacement
Serial Position Effect
Position Vectors
For instance, we want to locate a point P(x, y, z) relative to the origin of coordinates O. In that case, we can define a position...

