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Asymmetries in the processing of emotionally valenced words
Author(s) -
Dahl Mats
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9450.00218
Subject(s) - psychology , valence (chemistry) , emotional valence , cognitive psychology , cognition , task (project management) , social psychology , neuroscience , physics , management , quantum mechanics , economics
Earlier research has shown a valence dependent encoding asymmetry of emotional words (e.g., Pratto & John, 1991; White, 1996; Stenberg, Wiking & Dahl, 1998). To further study this asymmetry, two word detection experiments were performed based on the following hypothesis: when there is a more thoroughly processing of the valence, in this case a valence categorisation, there will be, in a subsequent task, prolonged latencies for negative words, compared to positive words. The result gave significantly prolonged response latencies for negative words compared to positive ones in the subsequent detection task when using an affective orienting task, something not found using a non‐affective orienting task. The results support the Mobilization‐Minimization hypothesis (Taylor, 1991), according to which negative events and stimuli occupy more cognitive resources, but with some limitation: the affective asymmetry, with prolonged latencies for negative words, occurs only when there is a deepened encoding of the affective component of the words.