Does ignoring lead to worse evaluations? A new explanation of the stimulus devaluation effect

Abstract

Affective evaluation of stimuli just seen in visual search tasks has been shown to depend on task-relevant stimulus configuration (Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003): Whereas targets and novel stimuli were evaluated similarly, distractors were devaluated. These results were explained by an inhibition-based account of the influence of selective attention on emotion. In the present experiments, we demonstrated that stimulus devaluation might not be a consequence of attentional inhibition. By simply instructing participants to react to an accepted or rejected stimulus in the visual search task of Experiment 1, we found distractor devaluation in the first case and target devaluation in the second case. We conclude that devaluation of stimuli is mediated by the affective connotation implied by response labels and instructions. This was confirmed in Experiment 2: To-be-ignored stimuli were not devaluated when participants knew that those stimuli would become task-relevant during the experiment.

Instruction to forget lead to emotional devaluation

“…could have led to a negative and positive affect encoding, respectively, since "forget"" items could be perceived as undesirable. This interpretation would be in agreement with the Evaluative coding account proposed by Dittrich and Klauer (2012). Thus, the "forget" instruction could have resulted in a general response bias and consequently participants may have given overall lower scores for those items.…”

I Choose, Therefore I Like: Preference for Faces Induced by Arbitrary Choice

“…However, our data did not show this pattern within a preference change effect. As pointed out in some previous studies, it could be that merely selecting or attending to an affectively neutral stimulus influences its subsequent affective evaluation even when participants make a decision unrelated to preference [29]–[31]. If true, some types of choice that do not seem to be directly related to preference judgment may induce preference change as well.…”

Testing Whether and When Abstract Symmetric Patterns Produce Affective Responses

“…Put another way, one could ask: Did the image produce an emotional response, which subsequently biased word valence discrimination, or did the conceptual representations and associations produce an emotional response, which subsequently biased word valence discrimination? For instance, Dittrich and Klauer have recently suggested that the devaluation of a distractor stimulus is mediated by the affective connotation implied by the response label (what is labeled as the target) and by the instructions [46]. …”