Current research on subliminal affective priming has mainly focused on the contributions of valence congruency to priming. However, many theoretical models claimed that not only valence but also the degree of activation associated with a stimulus, the so-called arousal dimension, plays an important role in affective processing. This study explored the possible influence of arousal in subliminal priming processes.
Because many researches proved that SOA (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony) is related to the size of affective priming effect, this study also explored the time course of the subliminal affective priming effect by faces with different arousal.
To sum up, we used faces with high, medium and low arousal faces as primes and ambiguous medium arousal faces as targets to investigate the subliminal affective priming effect by faces with different arousal under 200ms, 300ms, 500ms, 700ms four time interval conditions. Participants are instructed to press four buttons in a device to rate the arousal of target faces.
In present study, 120 undergraduates attended four tasks respectively. The stimulus came from the Chinese Affective Picture System (CAPS). All stimulus matched in gender, valence, arousal, dominance and attraction. Stimulus presentation and data collection were controlled by a microcomputer running software E-prime 1.0. The data was analyzed by the software SPSS 16.0.
The results showed that when time interval was 200ms, 300ms and 500ms, participants showed arousal-consistent changes in affective ratings of target faces. But no effect was present at the 700ms. In the conditions of 200ms、300ms and 500ms, When the value of the prime is negative, larger rating score was found with high arousal primes than with low arousal primes and larger rating score was found with high arousal primes than with medium arousal primes. When the value of the prime is positive, larger rating score was found with high arousal primes than with low arousal primes. But, only when time interval was 200ms, larger rating score was found with high arousal primes than with medium arousal primes, when time interval was 300ms and 500ms, the rating score between high arousal primes and medium arousal primes didn’t different.
The results showed: (1) Arousal can contribute to affective priming, and the contribution is different from the contribution of value to affective priming. (2)Affective congruency effect of arousal was observed only at the short time interval, when the time interval is longer than 500ms, the effect will be attenuation or disappear.
The findings will help increase our understanding of the subliminal affective priming. In further research, we should focus on the contributions of arousal congruency to priming.
Key words
subliminal affective priming /
arousal /
face /
time interval
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