Can Valence and Origin of Emotional Words Trigger the Interpretation of Ambiguous Stimuli in Terms of Warmth or Competence?

People tend to think that emotions influence the way they think in a spectacular way. We wanted to check whether it is possible to prime the interpretations of meaning of ambiguous stimuli by presenting emotion-laden words. The effect should not be spectacular, but systematic, and thus important. Participants were presented with words differing in valence and origin of an affective state, but aligned for arousal, concreteness, length and frequency of use. Their first task was to remember a word. The second task, performed while keeping in mind the word, was trying to guess by intuition a symbol-meaning. Participants interpreted whether an object represented by a coding symbol is related to warmth or competence. We expected positive valence and automatic origin to promote interpretations in terms of warmth and reflective origin in terms of competence. Positive valence appeared to intensify interpretations in terms of both warmth and competence, while the origin effect was found to be dissociative: automatic origin promoted intensiveness of warmth assessments and reflective origin intensiveness of competence assessments. The study showed an existing relation between emotional and social aspects of the mind, and therefore supports the conclusion that both domains may result from dual processes of a more general character.