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How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms

Affect and emotion are essential aspects of human life. These states or feelings signal personally relevant things or situations and color our memories and thoughts. Within the area of affective or emotion processing, evaluation–the assessment of the valence associated with a stimulus or event (i.e....

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Autores principales: Rohr, Michaela, Wentura, Dirk
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9301365/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35874359
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.911068
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author Rohr, Michaela
Wentura, Dirk
author_facet Rohr, Michaela
Wentura, Dirk
author_sort Rohr, Michaela
collection PubMed
description Affect and emotion are essential aspects of human life. These states or feelings signal personally relevant things or situations and color our memories and thoughts. Within the area of affective or emotion processing, evaluation–the assessment of the valence associated with a stimulus or event (i.e., its positivity or negativity)–is considered a fundamental process, representing an early and crucial stage in constructivist emotion theories. Valence evaluation is assumed to occur automatically when encountering a stimulus. But does this really apply always, even if we simply see a word? And if so, what exactly is processed or activated in memory? One approach to investigating this evaluative process uses behavioral priming paradigms and, first and foremost, the evaluative priming paradigm and its variants. In the present review, we delineate the insights gained from this paradigm about the relation of affect and emotion to cognition and language. Specifically, we reviewed the empirical evidence base with regard to this issue as well as the proposed theoretical models of valence evaluation, specifically with regard to the nature of the representations activated via such paradigms. It will become clear that affect and emotion are foremost (and, perhaps, even exclusively) triggered by evaluative priming paradigms in the sense that semantic affective knowledge is activated. This knowledge should be modeled as being active in working memory rather than in long-term memory as was assumed in former models. The emerging evidence concerning the processing of more specific emotion aspects gives rise to the assumption that the activation of these semantic aspects is related to their social importance. In that sense, the fast and (conditionally) automatic activation of valence and other emotion aspects in evaluative priming paradigms reveals something about affect and emotion: Valence and specific emotion aspects are so important for our daily life that encountering almost any stimulus entails the automatic activation of the associated valence and other emotion aspects in memory, when the context requires it.
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spelling pubmed-93013652022-07-22 How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms Rohr, Michaela Wentura, Dirk Front Psychol Psychology Affect and emotion are essential aspects of human life. These states or feelings signal personally relevant things or situations and color our memories and thoughts. Within the area of affective or emotion processing, evaluation–the assessment of the valence associated with a stimulus or event (i.e., its positivity or negativity)–is considered a fundamental process, representing an early and crucial stage in constructivist emotion theories. Valence evaluation is assumed to occur automatically when encountering a stimulus. But does this really apply always, even if we simply see a word? And if so, what exactly is processed or activated in memory? One approach to investigating this evaluative process uses behavioral priming paradigms and, first and foremost, the evaluative priming paradigm and its variants. In the present review, we delineate the insights gained from this paradigm about the relation of affect and emotion to cognition and language. Specifically, we reviewed the empirical evidence base with regard to this issue as well as the proposed theoretical models of valence evaluation, specifically with regard to the nature of the representations activated via such paradigms. It will become clear that affect and emotion are foremost (and, perhaps, even exclusively) triggered by evaluative priming paradigms in the sense that semantic affective knowledge is activated. This knowledge should be modeled as being active in working memory rather than in long-term memory as was assumed in former models. The emerging evidence concerning the processing of more specific emotion aspects gives rise to the assumption that the activation of these semantic aspects is related to their social importance. In that sense, the fast and (conditionally) automatic activation of valence and other emotion aspects in evaluative priming paradigms reveals something about affect and emotion: Valence and specific emotion aspects are so important for our daily life that encountering almost any stimulus entails the automatic activation of the associated valence and other emotion aspects in memory, when the context requires it. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-07-07 /pmc/articles/PMC9301365/ /pubmed/35874359 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.911068 Text en Copyright © 2022 Rohr and Wentura. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Rohr, Michaela
Wentura, Dirk
How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms
title How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms
title_full How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms
title_fullStr How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms
title_full_unstemmed How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms
title_short How Emotion Relates to Language and Cognition, Seen Through the Lens of Evaluative Priming Paradigms
title_sort how emotion relates to language and cognition, seen through the lens of evaluative priming paradigms
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9301365/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35874359
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.911068
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