Abstract
Emotion and its effects on other psychological phenomena are frequently studied by presenting emotional pictures for a short amount of time. However, the duration of exposure strongly differs across paradigms. In order to ensure the comparability of affective response elicitation across those paradigms, it is crucial to empirically validate emotional material not only with regard to the affective dimensions valence and arousal, but also with regard to varying presentation times. Despite this operational necessity for the temporal robustness of emotional material, there is only tentative empirical evidence on this issue. To close this gap, we conducted a large sample study testing for the influence of presentation time on affective response elicitation. Two hundred and forty emotional pictures were presented for either 200 or 1000 ms and were rated by 302 participants on the core affect dimensions valence and arousal. The most important finding was that affective response elicitation was comparable for 200 and 1000 ms presentation times, indicating reliable temporal robustness of affective response elicitation within the supra-liminal spectrum. Yet, a more detailed look on the data showed that presentation time impacted particularly on high arousing negative stimuli. However, because these interaction effects were exceedingly small, they must be interpreted with caution and do not endanger the main finding, namely the quite reliable temporal robustness of affective response elicitation. Results are discussed with regard to the comparability of affective response elicitation across varying paradigms.
Highlights
Emotions and affective reactions are core processes of human behavior
In order to ensure that participants would focus on their physical reactions when making those assessments and their actual arousal response, we provided as a further anchor on this decision a SelfAssessment Manikin (SAM; Bradley and Lang, 1994) scale for arousal
The main effect was qualified by an interaction with duration, F(1, 300) = 6.58, p < 0.05, ηp2 = 0.02, showing that high arousing pictures were rated more unpleasant when they were presented for 1000 ms than for 200 ms, t(300) = 3.89, p < 0.001, d = 0.45 (M1000 ms = −10.44, SD1000 ms = 19.25 and M200 ms = −5.95, SD200 ms = 19.98, respectively), whereas the low arousal condition did not show a differentiation, t(300) = 1.16, p = 0.25, d = 0.14
Summary
Emotions and affective reactions are core processes of human behavior. The dimensional view of emotion (Wundt, 1896), later supported by Osgood’s work (Osgood, 1952), used factor analytic methods (Carroll et al, 1959) and found two main dimensions, termed “valence” and “arousal,” explaining a great deal of variance in affective evaluations. Russell (2003) proposed a framework defining the atoms of emotions as core affect, which consists of the two dimensions of valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (sleepy to activated). These building bricks of emotion classification are often considered to be independent, there is considerable doubt
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