Emotional Priming Research Articles

Semantic and emotional priming below objective detection threshold

Abstract Semantic and emotional priming below objective detection threshold was investigated using a binocular pattern masking procedure. In the first experiment lexical decision time to emotionally aversive target stimuli was significantly faciliated by the presentation of emotionally aversive primes and primes semantically related to the target, thus replicating the emotional and semantic priming effects found supraliminally in Hill and Kemp-Wheeler (1989). In Experiment 2, a significant semantic priming effect was again found but the subliminal emotional priming effect of Experiment 1 did not replicate.

Mood-congruent memory in depression: emotional priming or elaboration?

We investigated whether mood-congruent memory (MCM) bias in depression is a function of implicit or explicit memory. Implicit memory is taken as a measure of ease of activation, whereas explicit memory also taps elaboration. As expected, MCM bias was found in the explicit memory task but not in the implicit memory task. We believe this finding supports the involvement of elaborative mechanisms in MCM. In addition, memory bias was found with words related to depression but not with words denoting physical threat. Thus, the MCM bias in explicit memory was found to be specific to information that was congruent with depression rather than to all negative information.

The emotional priming task: Results from a student population

The emotional priming task was used to test between an esteem-regulation and a more general affect-regulation interpretation of a phenomenon first reported by Power and Brewin (1990). A group of normal subjects were primed with emotion terms that were related to love, fear, sadness, or anger. A target adjective was presented either 250 ms or 2000 ms later, for which the subject's task was to indicate whether or not the adjective was self-descriptive. At the longer duration for negative emotion primes, the subjects endorsed fewer negative adjectives as self-descriptive and took longer to make these endorsements. The effect, however, was obtained with all three negative emotion types and therefore both the current and previous findings are interpreted to be evidence for affect-regulation rather than more specific esteem-regulation processes.

Self-esteem regulation in an emotional priming task

Abstract The details are presented of a new Emotional Priming task which can be used to investigate the processing of emotion-related material. In the version of the task described, the names of hypothetical life events are presented as the primes and the subject's response is to indicate whether or not a subsequent trait adjective is self-descriptive. Preliminary results from a sample of well undergraduates show that, for example, in the face of an esteem-threatening life event, the normal processes of self-esteem regulation become apparent at longer rather than shorter prime durations; under these conditions normal subjects are slower to endorse negative adjectives and overall endorse fewer such adjectives as self-descriptive.

Toward a Model to Explain Infant Preferences by Cerebral Emotional Asymmetry and Hemisphere Priming

This paper argues that the rightward preference observed in most infants can be described as the consequence of two characteristics of the human brain: (1) hemispheric asymmetry of processes underlying emotional experience and (2) priming of cerebral function. Ample research evidence supports each of these propositions, and they have gained increasing, though not universal, acceptance. In combination, they provide a sufficient explanation for several preferences which may have human survival value. They also produce several side-effects in human behavior which can be observed, but which appear to have no survival function.