On Wildebeests and Humans

On the basis of a functional perspective, we hypothesized that negative stimuli are detected faster than positive stimuli. In Experiment 1, participants were subliminally presented with positive and negative words or with no words at all. After each presentation, participants were asked whether they had seen a word. They detected negative words more accurately than positive words. In Experiment 2, participants were subliminally presented with negative or positive words. After each presentation, they were asked whether the presented word was positive or negative. Negative words were correctly categorized more often than positive words. Experiment 3 showed that although participants correctly categorized negative words more often than positive words, they could not guess the meaning of the words better than would be expected by chance. The results are discussed against the background of recent findings on basic affective processes.

[1]  Agneta H. Fischer,et al.  Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium , 2004 .

[2]  Stefan Wiens,et al.  Feelings and Emotions: The Concept of an Evolved Fear Module and Cognitive Theories of Anxiety , 2004 .

[3]  R. Fazio.  On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview , 2001 .

[4]  Jan De Houwer,et al.  Affective priming of pronunciation responses: effects of target degradation , 2001 .

[5]  D. Wentura,et al.  Automatic vigilance: the attention-grabbing power of approach- and avoidance-related social information. , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[6]  M. Banaji,et al.  When fair is foul and foul is fair: reverse priming in automatic evaluation. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[7]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  The affect system has parallel and integrative processing components: Form follows function. , 1999 .

[8]  K. C. Klauer,et al.  List-context effects in evaluative priming. , 1997, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[9]  T. Dalgleish,et al.  The emotional Stroop task and psychopathology. , 1996, Psychological bulletin.

[10]  S. Chaiken,et al.  The Automatic Evaluation Effect: Unconditional Automatic Attitude Activation with a Pronunciation Task , 1996 .

[11]  J. de Houwer,et al.  Verbal evaluative conditioning with undetected US presentations. , 1994, Behaviour research and therapy.

[12]  D. Hermans,et al.  The affective priming effect: Automatic activation of evaluative information in memory. , 1994 .

[13]  R. Zajonc,et al.  Affect, cognition, and awareness: affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. , 1993, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[14]  John T. Cacioppo,et al.  If Attitudes Affect How Stimuli Are Processed, Should They Not Affect the Event-Related Brain Potential? , 1993 .

[15]  S. Chaiken,et al.  The generality of the automatic attitude activation effect. , 1992, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[16]  O. John,et al.  Automatic vigilance: the attention-grabbing power of negative social information. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[17]  S. Kitayama,et al.  Interaction between affect and cognition in word perception. , 1990, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[18]  P. Ekman,et al.  Approach-withdrawal and cerebral asymmetry: emotional expression and brain physiology. I. , 1990, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  A G Greenwald,et al.  Unconscious processing of dichoptically masked words , 1989, Memory & cognition.

[20]  C. H. Hansen,et al.  Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[21]  David M. Sanbonmatsu,et al.  On the automatic activation of attitudes. , 1986, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[22]  A. Marcel.  Conscious and unconscious perception: An approach to the relations between phenomenal experience and perceptual processes , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[23]  J. Eccles.  The emotional brain. , 1980, Bulletin et memoires de l'Academie royale de medecine de Belgique.

[24]  R. Zajonc.  Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. , 1968 .

[25]  D. Broadbent,et al.  Perception of Emotionally Toned Words , 1967, Nature.

[26]  R. Bootzin,et al.  EVIDENCE FOR PERCEPTUAL DEFENSE UNCONTAMINATED BY RESPONSE BIAS. , 1965, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[27]  G. S. Blum,et al.  An experimental reunion of psychoanalytic theory with perceptual vigilance and defense. , 1954, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[28]  [Perception and personality]. , 1951, Archivio di psicologia, neurologia e psichiatria.

[29]  E. McGinnies.  Emotionality and perceptual defense. , 1949, Psychological review.

[30]  N. Pierce.  Origin of Species , 1914, Nature.