Activation and Inhibition of Affective Information: for Negative Priming in the Evaluation Task

Abstract

The affective congruency effect, wherein shorter response latencies are observed for affectively congruent prime-target pairs in the evaluation task (i.e. the target is evaluated as positive or negative) has often been interpreted in terms of a spread of activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. In the present article, it is argued that the effect might be due to a conflict between the responses that are activated by the prime and target, assuming that the prime serves as a distractor for processing the target. If such a conflict occurs, this would result in a negative priming effect, that is, an affective incongruency of prime (e.g. death) and target (e.g. wise) on trial n-1 (prime-trial) will result in a slowing of the response on trial n (probe-trial) if the probe target (e.g. lonely) is affectively congruent to the distractor of the prime-trial. This hypothesis was confirmed in Experiment 1 (N = 35) with a sequential presentation of distractor and target (i.e. SOA = 300msec) and further corroborated by Experiment 2 (N = 72) with a factorial manipulation of sequential and simultaneous (SOA = 0msec) presentation. These results favour a view that affective congruency effects in the evaluation task are due to response path interference processes which are resolved by an inhibition of the tendency to respond to the distractor.