TY - JOUR
T1 - The affective primacy hypothesis
T2 - Affective or cognitive processing of optimally and suboptimally presented primes?
AU - Kemps, Eva B.F.
AU - Erauw, Kris
AU - Vandierendonck, André
N1 - This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (unless stated otherwise) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright is retained by the author(s)
PY - 1996/1/1
Y1 - 1996/1/1
N2 - The aim of the present study was to pursue the research on the affective primacy hypothesis, which claims that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing (Zajonc, 1980). In line with Murphy and Zajonc (1993) a priming paradigm was used. The present work is basically a replication of their study in which the effects of affective priming under very brief (suboptimal - 4 ms) and longer (optimal - 1000 ms) exposure durations were compared, but using two additional exposure durations: 30 ms and 100 ms. Like Murphy and Zajonc, facial expressions were used as affective primes in addition to pictures which portrayed scenes and situations of everyday life. These were obtained in a preliminary study. Contrary to Murphy and Zajonc's results, the affective primes only produced significant shifts in subjects' preferential judgements of novel stimuli at longer exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures the novel stimuli were not judged differentially when primed with positive or negative affect. This was true for both facial expressions and pictures. Facial expressions influenced the liking ratings of the ideographs only at exposure durations of 30 ms and longer; pictures not until they were exposed for at least 100 ms. Thus, pictures depicting daily events require longer exposure durations than facial expressions in order to elicit an affective reaction. These results however do not provide any clear-cut evidence in support of the affective primacy hypothesis. Instead, they seem to suggest that affective stimuli do notevoke an affective reaction without additional cognitive processing, a conclusion that is supported by LeDoux's theory of affective-cognitive interaction in the brain.
AB - The aim of the present study was to pursue the research on the affective primacy hypothesis, which claims that positive and negative affective reactions can be evoked with minimal stimulus input and virtually no cognitive processing (Zajonc, 1980). In line with Murphy and Zajonc (1993) a priming paradigm was used. The present work is basically a replication of their study in which the effects of affective priming under very brief (suboptimal - 4 ms) and longer (optimal - 1000 ms) exposure durations were compared, but using two additional exposure durations: 30 ms and 100 ms. Like Murphy and Zajonc, facial expressions were used as affective primes in addition to pictures which portrayed scenes and situations of everyday life. These were obtained in a preliminary study. Contrary to Murphy and Zajonc's results, the affective primes only produced significant shifts in subjects' preferential judgements of novel stimuli at longer exposure durations. At suboptimal exposures the novel stimuli were not judged differentially when primed with positive or negative affect. This was true for both facial expressions and pictures. Facial expressions influenced the liking ratings of the ideographs only at exposure durations of 30 ms and longer; pictures not until they were exposed for at least 100 ms. Thus, pictures depicting daily events require longer exposure durations than facial expressions in order to elicit an affective reaction. These results however do not provide any clear-cut evidence in support of the affective primacy hypothesis. Instead, they seem to suggest that affective stimuli do notevoke an affective reaction without additional cognitive processing, a conclusion that is supported by LeDoux's theory of affective-cognitive interaction in the brain.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0039564855&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0039564855
SN - 0033-2879
VL - 36
SP - 209
EP - 219
JO - Psychologica Belgica
JF - Psychologica Belgica
IS - 4
ER -