Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts

Abstract

Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts Oosterwijk, S.; van der Leij, A.R.; Rotteveel, M. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. With a series of three studies, using an adapted dot-probe paradigm, we investigated the elicitation of spontaneous affective meaning. Although it is well established that humans show delays in disengaging their attention from conventional affective stimuli, it is unknown whether contextually acquired affective meaning similarly impacts attention. We examined attentional disengagement following pairs of neutral or slightly ambiguous words that in combination could evoke sex, violence or neutral associations. Study 1 demonstrated slower disengagement following words that conveyed sex or violence associations compared to words that conveyed neutral associations. This pattern was only present for participants who were aware of sex or violence associations. Study 2 replicated these results in a large sample, but only for sex associations. Study 3 replicated the effect while instructing participants explicitly to expect sex and violence associations. Finally, two control studies countered reasonable alternative explanations for our findings. Together, these studies show that contextually driven affective associations can arise quickly with the potential to influence attentional processes. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of emotion and language that highlight the importance of context in the generation of affective meaning. ARTICLE HISTORY

Attention Bias and Recognition of Sexual Images

“…In the sexually low-functioning group, they indeed found attention bias toward sexual words (η 2 = 0.106), but in the other group, they found no such effect. In could be argued, though, that the power of verbal stimulus rests in its semantic associations and not in specific perceptual features (Oosterwijk et al, 2017), which is why it may be preferable to use visual stimuli, such as pictures or photographs (Jiang and Vartanian, 2018).…”