Subliminal Affective Priming Effect By Faces With Different Arousal

Subliminal Affective Priming Effect by Faces With Different ArousalSubliminal affective priming has two different meanings:(1) First meaning refers to the phenomenon where subliminal presentation of a prime object shifts subsequent affective evaluation of the supraliminal object in the affective direction of the prime object.(2) Second meaning refers to the phenomenon occurs when the processing of a positive stimulus (e.g., love) is faster and more accurate when it is preceded by a positive stimulus (e.g., sunshine) rather than a negative stimulus (e.g., death). Since the discovery of subliminal affective priming, the researchers studied it by transforming the attributes of the target and prime, SOA and the tasks of the experiment.In this study, the dimension of valence was controlled and two groups of high arousal and low arousal faces were selected as priming stimulis. The study not only explored the time course of the subliminal affective priming effect by faces with different arousal, but also investigated the neural mechanisms of the subliminal affective priming effect with different arousal by recordings of event-related potential (ERP).In experiment1, we used faces with high, medium and low arousal faces as primes and ambiguous medium arousal faces as targets to investigate the subliminal affective priming effect by faces with different arousal under200ms,300ms,500ms,700ms four ISI conditions. Participants are instructed to press four buttons in a device to rate the arousal of ambiguous medium arousal target faces. The results showed that when ISI was200ms,300ms and500ms, participants showed arousal-consistent changes in affective ratings of target faces. But no effect was present at the longer ISI of700ms. Therefore, arousal can contribute to affective priming, and the contribution is different from the contribution of value to affective priming. Affective congruency effect of arousal was observed only at the short ISI, when the ISI is longer than500ms, the effect will be attenuation or disappear. Therefore, subliminal affective priming effect of arousal is based on fast-acting automatic processes.In experiment2, we used faces with high and low arousal faces as primes and ambiguous medium arousal faces as targets to investigate the subliminal affective priming effect by recordings of event-related potential (ERP). Participants are instructed to press four buttons in a device to rate the arousal of ambiguous medium arousal target faces. The results showed that affective congruency effect of arousal was observed only in the negative prime condition, ERP data showed that subliminal primes influenced LPC, with larger amplitudes in low priming trials. Although no affective congruency effect of arousal in the positive prime condition, subliminal primes influenced N400, with earlier latency in high priming trials. Therefore, valence may affect the subliminal affective priming effect of arousal, to be effective, the prime need to be negative. Subliminal affective priming effect of arousal attribute to the affection of late stage processing of targets by subliminal prime.