Generalization of responses to verbal stimuli

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Abstract A lever-pressing technique was employed to investigate the hypothesis that affective intensity contributes to the strength of the associative connection between words and therefore influences semantic generalization. Motor responses to high affect stimuli and their dominant associates were compared with responses to low affect stimuli and their dominant associates (the associative frequency being matched for both groups). There was significantly more response, and generalization of response, to high affect than to low affect stimuli. In the initial, incidental learning situation, associative frequency was an important factor in generalization, but this effect declined in the retest. It was concluded that affective intensity is a significant variable in both the incidental and the controlled learning of meaningful words, and in semantic generalization.