The Affective Meaning of Words is Constrained by the Conceptual Meaning

To directly investigate the reciprocal causal relationship of the conceptual and affective meaning of words, two priming experiments were conducted with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the influence of semantic relatedness on the affective priming effect was explored by manipulating the semantic associative strength between the prime and target words (i.e., high vs. low) while keeping the affective association between them constant (i.e., affectively congruent). In Experiment 2, the influence of the affective meaning on the semantic priming effect was explored by manipulating the emotional congruency of the prime and target words (i.e., congruent vs. incongruent) while keeping the semantic association between them constant (i.e., high associative strength). The results of Experiment 1 showed that when the semantic associative strength between the prime and target words was high, there was a significant affective priming effect, while no significant affective priming effect was found when the associative strength was low. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that in both the emotionally congruent and incongruent conditions, a significant semantic priming effect was obtained. These findings suggest that conceptual meaning is a more obligatory representation in words and that the processing of the affective meaning is constrained by the conceptual meaning of words.