Affective Simon Effect Research Articles

Affective Simon Effect: a study in children and adolescents

In this study, a modified variant of the Affective Simon Task (De Houwer & Eelen, 1998) was used in children and adolescents. Thus, we designed a task in which the participants had to respond choosing a happy or sad face depending on whether the figure presented on the screen was an object or an animal, ignoring its affective valence (positive or negative). Our results showed that the Affective Simon effect was produced only in the children group. Likewise, it was found that performance improved with age, which indicates an improvement of the processes involved in the resolution of the Affective Simon effect. The results of this study are a first exploratory approach to the investigation of the Affective Simon effect in children and young populations.

Training the face: Strategic practice as a means to regulate affect-induced facial muscle contractions.

Recently, it has been shown that the activation of affect-induced emotional reactions (i.e., manual approach/avoidance movements) can be modulated by strategic practice. The present study explored whether this modulation would also apply to affect-induced facial muscle contractions, which have been discussed to be relatively inflexibly linked to the processing of affective stimuli. In 2 experiments, participants conducted 2 different categorization tasks on positive and negative pictures of facial expressions (Experiment 1) or emotional scenes (Experiment 2) which were randomly framed in different colors. Black frames signaled to conduct an affective categorization which had to be executed either with a congruent or incongruent stimulus-response (S-R) mapping. Green or blue frames signaled to conduct a color classification (i.e., affective Simon task). Importantly, significant reductions of the affective Simon effect (that is, faster/more accurate positive [negative] responses to positive [negative] stimuli when categorizing a nonvalence stimulus feature) occurring after practice of incongruent (as compared with congruent) S-R mappings were observed for both manual and facial emotional responses. Importantly, the associative strength of long-term links does not limit the controllability of emotional responses through strategic practice. Thus, these results highlight the importance of practice as an effective means to even regulate facial muscle contractions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Social embodiment in directional stepping behavior

Embodiment theories emphasize the role played by sensory and motor processes in psychological states, such as social information processing. Motivated by this idea, we examined how whole-body postural behaviors couple to social affective cues, viz., pictures of smiling and angry faces. We adopted a Simon-like paradigm, whereby healthy female volunteers were asked to select and initiate a forward or backward step on a force plate in response to the gender of the poser (male/female), regardless of emotion. Detailed analysis of the spatiotemporal unfolding of the body center of pressure during the steps revealed that task-irrelevant emotion had no effect on the initiation times of the steps, i.e., there was no evidence of an affective Simon effect. An unexpected finding was that steps were initiated relatively slow in response to female angry faces. This Stroop-like effect suggests that postural behavior is influenced by whether certain stimulus features match or mismatch.

Older and Younger Adults Show Comparable Affective Compatibility and Simon Effects

Background/Study Context: In affective Simon tasks, participants respond to the color of stimuli with positive or negative affect by saying “good” or “bad.” The primary finding is that responses are faster when the affective valences of the stimulus and response correspond than when they do not. A similar compatibility effect occurs in an evaluation task for which stimulus affect is relevant and mapped compatibly or incompatibly to the responses. Methods: The present study compared the affective Simon and compatibility effects for younger and older adults in pure-task conditions (all trials from a single task) and mixed-task conditions (trials from the two tasks occurred equally often). Four schematic faces were used as stimuli for the affective Simon task and four different positive and negative images for the evaluation task. Results: The affective Simon effect was of similar size for older and younger adults under both pure- and mixed-task conditions: Mixed emotion-relevant trials increased the Simon effect when the mapping was compatible but had no influence on it when the mapping was incompatible. Older adults showed a larger affective compatibility effect than younger adults, but only the effect for younger adults was increased substantially by intermixing Simon-task trials. Conclusion: These results and others imply that automatic activation of corresponding affective responses occurs similarly for older and younger adults, with older adults mainly showing a deficit in intentional processing of incompatible affect mappings. The study provides little evidence that older adults have a general deficit at inhibiting activation by stimuli of their stereotypical responses.

Control of impulsive emotional behaviour through implementation intentions

Past research has established that people can strategically enhance or override impulsive emotional behaviour with implementation intentions (Eder, Rothermund, & Proctor, 2010). However, it is unclear whether emotional action tendencies change by intentional processes or by habit formation processes due to repeated enactment of the intention (or both). The present study shows that forming implementation intentions is sufficient to modulate emotional action tendencies. Participants received instructions about how to respond to positive and negative stimuli on evaluation trials but no such trials were actually presented. Results showed that merely intending to approach and avoid affective stimuli influenced emotional action tendencies in a modified affective Simon task in which affective valence was irrelevant. An affective Simon effect (i.e., faster reactions when the valence of the stimulus corresponded with the valence of the movement) was observed when participants intended evaluations with affectively congruent responses (i.e., positive–approach, negative–avoid); in contrast, the effect was reversed in direction when participants planned evaluations with incongruent responses (i.e., positive–avoid, negative–approach). Thus, implementation intentions can regulate implicit emotional responses even in the absence of possible habit formation processes. Implications for dual-system accounts of emotion regulation are discussed.

The prepared emotional reflex: Intentional preparation of automatic approach and avoidance tendencies as a means to regulate emotional responding.

Advance preparation of action courses toward emotional stimuli is an effective means to regulate impulsive emotional behavior. Our experiment shows that performing intentional acts of approach and avoidance in an evaluation task influences the unintended activation of approach and avoidance tendencies in another task in which stimulus valence is irrelevant. For the evaluation-relevant blocks, participants received either congruent (positive-approach, negative-avoidance) or incongruent (positive-avoidance, negative-approach) mapping instructions. In the evaluation-irrelevant blocks, approach- and avoidance-related lever movements were selected in response to a stimulus feature other than valence (affective Simon task). Response mapping in the evaluation task influenced performance in the evaluation-irrelevant task: An enhanced affective Simon effect was observed with congruent mapping instructions; in contrast, the effect was reversed when the evaluation task required incongruent responses. Thus, action instructions toward affective stimuli received in one task determined affective response tendencies in another task where these instructions were not in effect. These findings suggest that intentionally prepared short-term links between affective valence and motor responses elicit associated responses without a deliberate act of will, operating like a "prepared reflex."

Revisiting the affective Simon effect

We replicated the affective Simon effect found by De Houwer and Eelen (1998) in a situation in which participants had to respond by saying positive or negative depending on the grammatical category of the stimulus words while ignoring their affective connotation. Our results show that the affective Simon effect can be modulated by varying the proportion of experimental stimuli bearing a strongly polarised affective connotation. We propose that affective Simon effect depends at least in part on participants’ awareness of the correspondence between the affective connotation of the words and the responses. We also submit that this effect might not be specific to affective processing in that it is a token of a vast category of congruity effects that can be based on any kind of meaning of the stimuli, whether semantic or affective.

Influence of Intermixed Emotion-Relevant Trials on the Affective Simon Effect

"Good" and "bad" vocal responses are faster when an irrelevant emotional stimulus feature corresponds with the response than when it does not, a phenomenon known as the affective Simon effect. Two experiments investigated how this effect was influenced by an intermixed emotion-relevant evaluation task. In Experiment 1, four schematic faces (friendly, happy, hostile, sad) were used for the affective Simon task and four different images (bird, heart, gun, ghost) for the evaluation task, whereas in Experiment 2 the schematic faces were used for both tasks. Mixed-compatible emotion-relevant trials increased the affective Simon effect in both experiments, but mixed-incompatible emotion-relevant trials did not influence it. Also, the advantage of the compatible mapping over the incompatible mapping increased in mixed conditions rather than decreased. These results differ from those obtained when visual-manual tasks for which location is relevant and irrelevant are mixed. They confirm that enhancement of the affective Simon effect when the Simon task is mixed with a compatible emotion-relevant task is due to increased salience of the affective valence.

Automatic integration of non-perceptual action effect features: the case of the associative affective Simon effect.

In the first phase of Experiment 1, participants were instructed to move a response key up or down in response to a go signal. One of both responses was consistently followed by an aversive stimulus, whereas the other response was never followed by the aversive stimulus. In a subsequent test phase, the same responses had to be emitted according to the grammatical category (noun or adjective) of positive and negative target words. Results showed that the level of affective correspondence between the task-irrelevant positive or negative connotation of the target and the motivational significance of the effect of the correct response influenced performance. The results of Experiment 2 replicated those of Experiment 1, using alternating target-response assignment. These findings point to the integration of affective action effect feature codes in the cognitive representation of actions.

A conceptual replication and extension of the Affective Simon Effect

An experiment was conducted to examine the sensitivity of the affective Simon paradigm to the affective connotation of pictures. In a recent experiment carried out by De Houwer and colleagues (De Houwer, Crombez, Baeyens, & Hermans, 2001, experiment 3), participants were asked to respond using the words POSITIVE or NEGATIVE depending on whether a picture depicted a man-made or natural object. Responses to pictures were faster when the valence of the picture matched the required response. The current study replicated this effect when 16 participants were asked to respond using the words NICE and NASTY depending on whether positive or negative pictures were humans or animals. Furthermore, the Affective Simon Effect was found, but reduced in magnitude, when a further 16 participants were asked to respond using the affective nouns COMEDY or CANCER to the same affective pictures.

A conceptual replication and extension of the Affective Simon Effect

A conceptual replication and extension of the Affective Simon Effect

On the generality of the affective Simon effect

In affective Simon studies, participants are to select between a positive and negative response on the basis of a nonaffective stimulus feature (i.e., relevant stimulus feature) while ignoring the valence of the presented stimuli (i.e., irrelevant stimulus feature). De Houwer and Eelen (1998) showed that the time to select the correct response is influenced by the match between the valence of the response and the (irrelevant) valence of the stimulus. In the affective Simon studies that have been reported until now, only words were used as stimuli and the relevant stimulus feature was always the grammatical category of the words. We report four experiments in which we examined the generality of the affective Simon effect. Significant affective Simon effects were found when the semantic category, grammatical category, and letter-case of words was relevant, when the semantic category of photographed objects was relevant, and when participants were asked to give nonverbal approach or avoidance responses on th...

On the generality of the affective Simon effect

In affective Simon studies, participants are to select between a positive and negative response on the basis of a nonaffective stimulus feature (i.e., relevant stimulus feature) while ignoring the valence of the presented stimuli (i.e., irrelevant stimulus feature). De Houwer and Eelen (1998) showed that the time to select the correct response is influenced by the match between the valence of the response and the (irrelevant) valence of the stimulus. In the affective Simon studies that have been reported until now, only words were used as stimuli and the relevant stimulus feature was always the grammatical category of the words. We report four experiments in which we examined the generality of the affective Simon effect. Significant affective Simon effects were found when the semantic category, grammatical category, and letter-case of words was relevant, when the semantic category of photographed objects was relevant, and when participants were asked to give nonverbal approach or avoidance responses on the basis of the grammatical category of words. Results also showed that the magnitude of the affective Simon effect depended on the nature of the relevant feature.