When are pleasant words learned faster than unpleasant words?

Abstract

The role of the pleasantness-unpleasantness of words was examined in experiments by means of free-recall, serial-learning, and a variety of paired-associate tasks. Pleasant words were learned faster than unpleasant words only in nonsense syllable-word paired-associate tasks. In an attempt to explain these differential findings, a distinction was drawn between tasks that were assumed to involve an assignment of connotative meaning to meaningless items (nonsense syllable-word pairs) and those tasks in which this process was considered to be only minimally present (word-nonsense syllable and word-word pairs, free recall, and serial learning). It was hypothesized that affective tone is a variable in the acquisition of new meaning, but not in other aspects of verbal learning.