Priming of valence and space

• Applicant: Dr. Shah Khalid
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2014 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 250508203

Affective and spatial meanings are related: Positive concepts are associated with elevated positions, negative with lower positions. This is already reflected in language use. E.g., to be in high spirits means the same as to be jolly. How does this association come about? The project seeks to answer the question whether spatial meaning could be rooted in affective meaning. Affective evaluations are fast and automatic. Therefore, it is, e.g., conceivable that more positive evaluation of larger objects and more negative evaluation of smaller objects could tone and ground the acquisition of spatial concepts: A more positive evaluation of larger than smaller objects might be due to the better and, hence, more positively evaluated recognition of larger than smaller objects alone. To test the grounding of spatial meaning in automatic evaluations, I will conduct priming experiments. The participants will be presented with affective (German) words, such as dear (German lieb), as primes presented before spatial target words, such as above (German oben). If affective meaning grounds spatial meaning, each spatial word should have an affective connotation that can be primed by a fitting (congruent) affective prime and delayed by a non-fitting (incongruent) affective prime. If this congruence effect depends on automatic evaluation, the congruence effect should show where the primes are truly task-irrelevant and visually masked, that is, presented below the threshold of aware perception. This hypothesis will be tested in the project. To that end, different affective primes (emotional adjectives, emotional verbs, and emotional faces) will be used, as well as methods, such as event-related potentials (ERPs), that are suited to demonstrate a congruence effect where there is none in the classification times. Diverse control conditions that should lead to congruence effects will be used to ensure the sensitivity of the experimental procedure.The project will also address a second question: Does unconscious emotional priming by faces depend on subcortical processing? The evolutionary relevance of faces could be reflected in the automatic processing along phylogenetic old, subcortical routes. Different neuropsychological and imaging studies suggested this. However, all these studies have shortcomings, e.g., a low generalizability of findings with neuropsychological patients to healthy humans. The question regarding subcortical origins of emotional priming will therefore be addressed with spatial frequency and contrast manipulations of subliminal face primes. This method can be applied to healthy participants where it allows locating processing in different visual pathways.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Peter König