On the latency of object recognition and affect: Evidence from speeded reaction time tasks

According to the semantic primacy hypothesis of emotion generation, stimuli must be semantically categorized to evoke emotions. This hypothesis was tested in two speeded reaction time experiments that also explored the processes underlying valence judgments. Participants viewed pleasant and unpleasant pictures. In different blocks of trials, they pressed a key as soon as they experienced the feeling evoked by a picture, recognized the depicted object, or detected the valence (pleasant/unpleasant) of the picture. Object recognition was significantly earlier than affect onset, and the two latencies were positively correlated. The latency of valence detection was in between the latencies of object recognition and affect and correlated with both. Experiment 2 additionally found that blurring the pictures delayed the onset of affect and that this effect was partially mediated by delayed object recognition. In contrast, false-coloring the pictures was found to delay affect mainly by reducing its intensity. Coloring also delayed valence judgments of pleasant pictures. The findings provide further chronometric support for the semantic primacy hypothesis of emotion generation and shed light on the processes underlying valence judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).