Valence and Origin of Emotional Words Influence on Subsequent Perception of Ambiguous Stimuli in Terms of Competence Versus Warmth

The aim of this study was to examine whether the valence and origin of emotional words can alter perception of ambiguous objects in terms of warmth versus competence, fundamental dimensions of social cognition. 60 individuals were invited into the study focusing on the limits of intuition. They were asked to try to guess the meaning of Japanese pictorial signs in terms of their warmth versus competence connotations. Before each trial a subsequent memory load task was applied. Participants were supposed to read and remember words creating a factorial manipulation of valence (three levels) and origins (three levels: automatic, neutral and reflective) of affective connotations presenting to them for 500 ms. For positively valenced words, automatic originated ones resulted in perception of ambiguous signs more in terms of warmth, while reflective originated words resulted in perception of signs more in terms of competence. This study shows that social perception of warmth versus competence is susceptible to emotional influence of unrelated stimulation, and thus can be primed by objects in the environment. Warmth may be treated as linked with automatic mind processes, while competence may be treated as associated with the controlled part of the mind. In a broader context, this experiment results support claim that distinct dualities identified in dual-processes theories of mind are related to one another, and in fact they may be emanations of two more general systems of mind.