The affective auditory verbal learning test

Abstract

The study of emotion is hindered by the lack of tests for affect perception or comprehension. One solution is to develop affective versions of well-known tests. Using an index of word norms (Toglia & Battig, 1978), positively and negatively valenced word lists were developed as alternate forms of the affectively neutral Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVL; Rey, 1964). Participants (N=102) received either the original RAVL list, the positively valenced list, or the negatively valenced list. Results are depicted across acquisition trials and location within the list for comparison of primacy and recency effects. Each word list yielded comparable patterns of acquisition. Participants receiving the negative list evidenced an enhanced primacy effect, while participants receiving the positive list evidenced an enhanced recency effect. The positive and negative lists may prove useful in the evaluation of individuals with affective disorders and may provide an alternative for affect induction through an active learning paradigm.

Development and psychometric validation of the verbal affective memory test

“…However, existing VAMTs have suffered from methodological problems in their test procedures (e.g. using separate positive and negative lists of words administered to separate individuals; Snyder & Harrison, 1997), stimulus sets (e.g. including unbalanced [1:3] proportions of positive and negative stimuli and using too few words to avoid ceiling effects; Strauss & Allen, 2013), and validation methods (e.g.…”

“…Most have only been validated in smaller, healthy samples (typically 25-50 participants; Baños et al, 2001;Direnfeld & Roberts, 2006;Klaassen, Riedel, Deutz, & Van Praag, 2002;Pratto & John, 1991). The Affective Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AAVLT) was validated in a larger sample (Snyder & Harrison, 1997) but used separate positive and negative lists of words administered to separate individuals, although affective biases are more adequately assessed by administering positive, negative, and neutral material to the same individuals (e.g. Elliott et al, 2011).…”

Models of anger: contributions from psychophysiology, neuropsychology and the cognitive behavioral perspective

“…The idea of functional ''space'' holds that tasks involving competing systems may provide interference for one another (Kinsbourne 1978(Kinsbourne , 1985. This idea of competing systems has provided the platform for the investigation of the neuropsychology of emotion and functional mapping of proposed functional systems of emotion (e.g., Everhart et al 2005;Foster et al 2005;Snyder and Harrison 1997;Demaree et al 2002). The following sections will discuss the effects of negative affectivity, in general, and specifically anger on neuropsychological measures of cognitive function.…”

“…For example, it as been shown that individuals reporting high levels of cognitive anger demonstrate a left ear (right hemisphere) advantage on a dichotic listening task while individuals reporting lower levels of cognitive anger demonstrate a relative right ear (left hemisphere) advantage on dichotic listening tasks (Demaree and Harrison 1997). Although numerous studies utilizing the affective auditory verbal learning test (AAVL; Snyder and Harrison 1997) have demonstrated interesting effects in terms of cortical activation and cardiovascular effects, these studies have failed to demonstrate any consistent patterns related to the affective verbal learning component in the auditory modality .…”

Investigation of the Laterality of Hostility, Cardiovascular Regulation, and Auditory Recognition

“…Snyder and Harrison (1997) recently developed the Auditory Affective Verbal Learning Test (AAVLT) consisting of lists of positively and negatively valenced words. The negative and positive emotional lists were designed to be analogous to those on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVL) but to vary on the affect dimension (Rey, 1964).…”