Affective Congruency Effects Research Articles

Effects of affective and emotional congruency on facial expression processing under different task demands

Contextual influences on responses to facial expressions of emotion were studied using a context-target paradigm that allowed distinguishing the effects of affective congruency (context and target of same/different valence: positive or negative) and emotional congruency (context and target representing the same/different emotion: anger, fear, happiness). Sentences describing anger, fear or happiness-inducing events and faces expressing each of these emotions were used as contexts and targets, respectively. While between-valence comparisons (context and target of similar/different valence) revealed affective congruency effects, within-valence comparisons (context and target of similar valence and same/different emotion) revealed emotional congruency effects. In Experiment 1 no evidence of emotional congruency and limited evidence of affective congruency were found with an evaluative task. In Experiment 2 effects of both affective and emotional congruency were observed with an emotion recognition task. In this case, angry and fearful faces were recognized faster in emotionally congruent contexts. In Experiment 3 the participants were asked explicitly to judge the emotional congruency of the target faces. Emotional congruency effects were again found, with faster judgments of angry and fearful faces in the corresponding emotional contexts. Moreover, judgments of angry expressions were faster and more accurate in happy than in anger contexts. Thus, participants found easier to decide that angry faces did not match a happy context than to judge that they did match an anger context. These results suggest that there are differences in the way that facial expressions of positive and negative emotions are discriminated and integrated with their contexts. Specifically, compared to positive expressions, contextual integration of negative expressions seems to require a double check of the valence and the specific emotion category of the expression and the context.

Suboptimal facial expression primes in textual media messages: Evidence for the affective congruency effect

The effectiveness of suboptimal affective primes in real media applications has remained debatable. We investigated the effects of suboptimally (at 10-ms exposure) presented facial expression primes on emotional responses to, and cognitive evaluations of, textual (business news) messages ranging from slightly unpleasant to slightly pleasant among 33 participants. Facial expression primes were presented repeatedly on a simulated small screen of a mobile device during a news reading task. Facial electromyography (EMG) recordings were used as physiological indices of positive and negative emotions. Our results showed affective congruency effects between news messages and facial expression primes: joyful facial expressions, compared to angry primes or no priming, elicited higher positive affect evaluations and more positive facial EMG responses, as well as higher interest, when embedded in affectively more positive news. On the other hand, the mere presence of suboptimal primes was detrimental to the perceived trustworthiness of news. These results suggest that embedding suboptimal facial expression primes into textual media messages may exert an influence on affectively congruent messages; at the same time, our results highlight the potential hazards and difficulties of utilizing such primes.

Attention please: No affective priming effects in a valent/neutral-categorisation task

Affective congruency effects in the evaluation task can be explained by either spreading of activation or response competition. Eliminating effects of response compatibility by using other tasks (semantic categorisation, naming task) typically also eliminates affective congruency effects. However, there is no need for processing the affective information of the stimuli in these tasks either, which could be necessary for an affectively mediated spreading of activation (Spruyt et al., 2007, 2009, 2012). We introduced a new task to further test this hypothesis. The valent/neutral-categorisation task does not confound affective congruency with response compatibility, but still requires a processing of the stimuli's valence. No affective congruency effect was obtained with this task in two experiments, disfavouring a conditional spreading activation account. On the other hand, a significant priming effect was found for associated word pairs in Experiment 1, providing evidence for the sensitivity of the task to detect spreading activation processes.

Incongruency effects in affective processing: Automatic motivational counter-regulation or mismatch-induced salience?

Attention is automatically allocated to stimuli that are opposite in valence to the current motivational focus (Rothermund, 2003; Rothermund, Voss, & Wentura, 2008). We tested whether this incongruency effect is due to affective–motivational counter-regulation or to an increased salience of stimuli that mismatch with cognitively activated information. Affective processing biases were assessed with a search task in which participants had to detect the spatial position at which a positive or negative stimulus was presented. In the motivational condition, positive or negative affective–motivational states were induced by performance feedback after each trial. In the cognitive activation condition, participants memorised the word “good” or “bad” during the search task. The affective incongruency effect was replicated in the motivational condition, whereas an affective congruency effect obtained in the cognitive activation condition. These findings support an explanation of affective incongruency effects in terms of automatic counter-regulation that is motivational in nature.

Psychophysiological evidence of response conflict and strategic control of responses in affective priming

This experiment investigated the role of conflict in the response and evaluative categorization systems in the affective congruency effect using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants completed a primed evaluative decision task in which the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was manipulated. The size of the affective congruency effect increased along with the proportion of congruent trials. ERP data identified the locus of this effect in the response system: the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) showed that preferential response activation occurred in motor cortex following prime onset, and the fronto-central N2 (conflict monitoring) component indicated that conflict occurred when the response activated by the prime differed from the target response, irrespective of the affective congruency of the prime and target. The extent of this conflict covaried with strategic processing of primes, as participants directed less attention to primes that were likely to elicit conflict. These data support a response conflict account of affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task and indicate that strategic control of attention is important in determining the extent to which conflict occurs.

Emotionally charged earcons reveal affective congruency effects

In the present study, the affective impact of earcons on stimulus classification is investigated. We show, using a picture–categorization task, that the affective connotation of earcons in major and minor mode (representing positive and negative valence, respectively) can be congruent or incongruent with response valence. Twenty participants classified pictures of animals and instruments in 256 trials, using positive and negative Yes or No responses. Together with the pictures, either a chord in major mode or minor mode was played. The affective valence of the chords either did or did not match the valence of responses. Response–time latencies show congruency effects of the matching and non–matching sound and response valences, indicating that it is important to carefully investigate human–computer interfaces for potential affective–congruency effects, as these can either facilitate or inhibit user performance.

Reversing the affective congruency effect: The role of target word frequency of occurrence

In this research the outcome of an affective priming experiment is shown to critically depend on the frequency of occurrence of the target words used. Low frequency target words (5.7 occurrences per million words) resulted in an affective congruency effect, i.e., faster responses following affectively congruent than incongruent primes. High frequency target words (32.6 occurrences per million) resulted in a reverse priming effect, i.e., faster responses following incongruent than congruent primes. The size of the congruency effect was larger than the size of the reverse priming effect, thus masking its emergence when word frequency was not taken into account. We propose that target word frequency has its influence via an accessibility-related mechanism having to do with differences in observed changes in affect between prime and target.

Locational uncertainty moderates affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task

Affective congruency effects are often investigated using the evaluative decision task. It was predicted that uncertainty about the location of stimulus presentation moderates the strength of affective congruency effects in this task. In line with this hypothesis, effects of affective congruency were observed in two experiments only if locational uncertainty about the target location required participants to distribute their attention evenly over the visual field. Inducing certainty about the target location allowed participants to narrow their attentional focus and to suppress the influence of irrelevant distractor words. The results suggest that affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task are not exclusively based on automatic processes, but also depend on a strategic and flexible allocation of attention.

About the impact of automaticity in the minimal group paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasks

Two experiments examined whether novel, minimal ingroups are automatically associated with positive affect while outgroups do not elicit such positive evaluative default. Participants were assigned to social categories in a typical minimal group setting and subsequently administered a masked priming task, i.e. prime words were not consciously recognized. Following either the presentation of a priori positive or negative words or the presentation of the group labels, participants classified adjectives with regard to their valence (positive/negative). In Experiment 1, a standard affective priming paradigm was realized with response latencies as dependent measures; in Experiment 2, a response window technique was used, with errors as crucial measure. In both studies, significant affective congruency effects emerged similarly for standard primes and category labels, indicating ingroup bias on an implicit level. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Activation and Inhibition of Affective Information: for Negative Priming in the Evaluation Task

The affective congruency effect, wherein shorter response latencies are observed for affectively congruent prime-target pairs in the evaluation task (i.e. the target is evaluated as positive or negative) has often been interpreted in terms of a spread of activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. In the present article, it is argued that the effect might be due to a conflict between the responses that are activated by the prime and target, assuming that the prime serves as a distractor for processing the target. If such a conflict occurs, this would result in a negative priming effect, that is, an affective incongruency of prime (e.g. death) and target (e.g. wise) on trial n-1 (prime-trial) will result in a slowing of the response on trial n (probe-trial) if the probe target (e.g. lonely) is affectively congruent to the distractor of the prime-trial. This hypothesis was confirmed in Experiment 1 (N = 35) with a sequential presentation of distractor and target (i.e. SOA = 300msec) and further corroborated by Experiment 2 (N = 72) with a factorial manipulation of sequential and simultaneous (SOA = 0msec) presentation. These results favour a view that affective congruency effects in the evaluation task are due to response path interference processes which are resolved by an inhibition of the tendency to respond to the distractor.