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Abstract
Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negative valence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on such elementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus on Neurocognitive Poetics and discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are associated with the “basic” emotions joy/happiness and disgust.
Highlights
Deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, i.e., – in terms of psychological emotion theories – whether it has positive or negative valence is perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life
We started out with Virginia Woolf ’s question How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking? Based on previous empirical and theoretical work from our group, we submitted the hypothesis that the main factor used in the investigation of elementary affective decisions (EADs), i.e., stimulus valence, is a semantic superfeature resulting from a yet unknown integration of experiential and distributional data, at least partially represented in associative activation patterns of affective-semantic networks starting out in parts of the limbic system (Ponz et al, 2013; Briesemeister et al, 2014, 2015; Jacobs et al, 2015; Kuhlmann et al, 2016)
Our review of methods and materials used in the scientific study of EADs, as well as of the factors determining the liking of verbal materials with increasing degrees of complexity provided accumulated empirical evidence for this assumption
Summary
Deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, i.e., – in terms of psychological emotion theories – whether it has positive or negative valence is perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life. While EADs are made with regard to all types of perceived objects in daily life (Lebrecht et al, 2012), here we focus on EADs concerning verbal materials in the context of literature reception and reading from a Neurocognitive Poetics perspective, i.e., the investigation of the neuronal, experiential, and behavioral effects produced by literary texts (Jacobs, 2015b). We examine methods used to measure EADs in the context of verbal materials of differing degrees of complexity
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