The Subliminal Priming With Semantic And Affective Interference

The current study made an attempt to probe into the relationship between cognition and affection by employing a comparative approach with semantic and affective priming paradigms. With words from Chinese Affective Words System (CAWS) and pictures from Chinese Affective Picture System (CAPS) as prime stimuli, the experiment investigated the semantic priming effect with affective interference and affective priming effect with semantic interference at both SOA levels (300ms,100ms) in evaluation categorization task through recording the response latencies and accuracies to targets with E-Prime software, which could further reveal the relationship between cognition and affection. Results of data analyses revealed that the priming could be better observed under no interference condition compared with the priming under interference condition. At both SOA levels, the semantic interference effect on mood was significantly higher than emotional interference effect on semanteme. And better priming effect can be found at long SOA of300ms than at short SOA of100ms. In addition, it makes easier for participants to evaluate the valence of positive targets than the valence of negative targets. Therefore, the present study was in line with the assumption that cognition is prior to affection and the notion of negative preferential.