Many models of emotion assume that the emotional response is preceded by an assessment of a stimulus' relevance to the perceiver's goals. Although widely assumed, experimentally controlling and, hence, empirically testing the effect of a stimulus' relevance on the emotional response has proven challenging. In this study, we used stimuli with high ecological validity and manipulated their relevance while holding constant the perceptual features of the stimuli. In the experiment, participants were given the result of their Israeli Psychometric Entrance Test (PET). The PET score is highly relevant to most participants, as, at the time of the experiment, it is the only unknown about whether they shall be admitted to their major of choice at the university. Relevance of the information was experimentally controlled both binarily by manipulating whether the presented score is the participant's or belongs to another unfamiliar participant and parametrically by manipulating the probability that a presented score is their actual PET score. We found a substantial effect for manipulated relevance on self-report, electrodermal activity, and heart rate. The results provide evidence that information about a stimulus' relevance modulates the emotional response to it. (PsycINFO Database Record
Les gestes conventionnels peuvent se suffire à eux-mêmes : dire « bonjour » et « au revoir » de la main, « boire », « manger », etc. Ces gestes existent dans toutes les langues, mais leur forme diffère selon les langues. Les gestes conventionnels relèvent d’enculturation. Nous nous sommes donc posée la question de leur apprentissage chez les enfants bilingues, à savoir si, pour une même signification, ces gestes gardaient leur forme en fonction de la langue utilisée. Pour cela, nous avons demandé à des enfants bilingues roumains-français de 7 et 11 ans de produire dix gestes conventionnels qui s’expriment différemment en français et en roumain, mais qui ont la même signification. Les résultats montrent que le taux de connaissance est le même quelles que soient la langue et l’aisance dans la langue, mais que les enfants les plus jeunes produisent moins de gestes conventionnels et confondent plus les gestes que les enfants plus âgés.
The current work investigated the potential dissociation between two modes of valence: affective valence (valence of the emotional response) and semantic valence (stored knowledge about the valence of an object/event). A series of six experiments systematically examined the divergent effect of manipulating the amount of perceptual details on affective valence and semantic knowledge about valence. We predicted that affective valence, more than semantic valence, will be affected by manipulating the amount of stimulus perceptual details. Experiment 1a manipulated the amount of perceptual details by presenting the same stimulus content with different quantity of perceptual details. We compared three conditions: a very short movie clip, a still picture that was taken from the movie clip, and a blurred version of the picture from the movie clip. Experiment 1b replicated Experiment 1a using a stronger filter for blurring the picture. Experiment 2 used different manipulation of filtering out visual perceptual details by comparing still pictures to outlined images. Experiment 3 generalized the results of Experiments 1 and 2 by comparing pictures and written words. Experiments 4a and 4b examined the hypothesis regarding the divergent effect of the amount of perceptual details on semantic and affective valence, using physiological signals and a reaction time task, measures that do not rely on self-reports. Results suggest that affective valence is more sensitive to the change in the amount of perceptual details of the stimulus than semantic valence. The psychological mechanism that might underlie this effect and the theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.
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