Abstract
Affective stimuli can influence immediate reactions as well as spontaneous behaviors. Much evidence for such influence comes from studies of facial expressions. However, it is unclear whether these effects hold for other affective stimuli, and how the amount of stimulus processing changes the nature of the influence. This paper addresses these issues by comparing the influence on consumption behaviors of emotional pictures and valence-matched words presented at suboptimal and supraliminal durations. In Experiment 1, both suboptimal and supraliminal emotional facial expressions influenced consumption in an affect-congruent, assimilative way. In Experiment 2, pictures of both high- and low-frequency emotional objects congruently influenced consumption. In comparison, words tended to produce incongruent effects. We discuss these findings in light of privileged access theories, which hold that pictures better convey affective meaning than words, and embodiment theories, which hold that pictures better elicit somatosensory and motor responses.
Highlights
What is the relationship between affect and cognition? Earlier debates saw some strong competing claims about the separation of the presumed “systems,” primacy of one system over the other, and the minimal processing necessary to trigger affective vs. cognitive reactions (Lazarus, 1984; Zajonc, 1984, 2001)
The MANOVA on words revealed that the impact of valence was not significant (F = 1.04), with the direction of means suggesting a decrease of consumption behavior after positive words
We found no significant effect of facial expressions on subjective experience, though obviously proving the null effect of faces on subjective experience would require evidence for H0 (Bayes factor favoring the absence of an effect) ideally with much larger samples
Summary
What is the relationship between affect and cognition? Earlier debates saw some strong competing claims about the separation of the presumed “systems,” primacy of one system over the other, and the minimal processing necessary to trigger affective vs. cognitive reactions (Lazarus, 1984; Zajonc, 1984, 2001). What is the relationship between affect and cognition? Recent years have witnessed a growing consensus that affective and cognitive processes are tightly intertwined, in terms of both their psychological function and neural substrates, and the effort moved to understand the mechanisms of this connection (Clore and Colcombe, 2003; Pessoa and Adolphs, 2011; LeDoux, 2012; Winkielman et al, 2015a; Barrett, 2017). Rather than contrasting processing with and without awareness to test for “primacy,” the effort moved on to manipulations of stimulus and task variables that may highlight the affective and the cognitive component of processing. Before we outline the current studies, we offer some background on the topic of affective influence
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