Motivational influences on word recognition: II. Affective coding

Abstract The effects of motivation and affective word content on tachistoscopic recognition were assessed in two experiments. Even with arousal heightened by white noise and with the word exposure slowed (15 vs. 10 msec) per trial, the earlier finding (Ferguson, 1988) was replicated, that under para...
Ausführliche Beschreibung

Abstract The effects of motivation and affective word content on tachistoscopic recognition were assessed in two experiments. Even with arousal heightened by white noise and with the word exposure slowed (15 vs. 10 msec) per trial, the earlier finding (Ferguson, 1988) was replicated, that under parafoveal viewing hunger, compared to satiation, fails to have a significant effect. Hemispheric asymmetry in affective bias for pleasant and unpleasant words was not found. However, strong evidence was found for significant affective word coding at the lexical stage: for categories with comparable interletter and word frequencies, food words required fewer trials for word recognition, and negatively emotional words required the most trials. In contrast, the reaction times, which likely are more representative of postlexical processing, were fastest for animal words. Ausführliche Beschreibung