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.人们普遍认为，情绪会以极具影响力的方式左右自身的思维过程。本研究旨在验证：通过呈现带有情绪色彩的词汇，是否能够启动对歧义刺激的意义解读。该效应并非具有戏剧性的即时影响，而是系统性的，因此具备重要研究价值。实验向被试呈现的词汇，在情绪效价（valence）与情绪状态起源维度上存在差异，但在唤醒度（arousal）、具体性（concreteness）、词长与使用频率上均进行了匹配。被试的第一项任务为记忆一个词汇；第二项任务则需在记住该词汇的前提下，通过直觉猜测某符号的含义。被试需判断编码符号所代表的客体，与温暖（warmth）还是能力（competence）相关。我们预期，积极效价与自动性起源会推动被试做出温暖维度的解读，而反思性起源则会推动能力维度的解读。研究结果显示，积极效价会强化被试在温暖与能力两个维度上的解读；而情绪起源的效应则呈现出分离性：自动性起源会强化对温暖维度的评估，反思性起源则强化对能力维度的评估。本研究证实了心理的情绪维度与社会维度之间存在关联，因此支持如下结论：这两个领域均可由具有更普适性的双重加工过程所催生。