Negative Affect Inhibited The Accessibility Of Nonconscious Goal

When a desired goal coactivated with negative affect, the accessibility of the goalrepresentation dropped, the motivation of the goal declined, and then thenonconscious of goal pursuit ceased[1]. The aim of the present research was toinvestigate whether the positive learning experience of the goal would enhance theinhibition of the accessibility of the goal representation as a result of the coactivationof nonconscious the goal and negative affect.The present research selected study-related words as the goal, and adopted“pretest-perceptual learning-posttest” paradigm to investigate whether perceptuallearning of the goal would enhance the accessibility of the goal representation when itcoactivated with negative affect with. In the pretest, we used the classical paradigm ofprevious studies, by adopting three consecutive tasks, aiming to demonstrated theprevious findings that the accessibility of the goal representation would be reduced tobaseline level when the goal coactivated with negative affect.120seventh-gradestudents participated in the pretest, and were randomly assigned to either theinterest-oriented perceptual learning condition or meaning-oriented perceptuallearning condition. The perceptual learning was performed7days,30minutes daily.The experimental design and methods of the posttest was the same as the pretest,aiming to investigate whether interest-oriented or meaning-oriented perceptuallearning of the goal would improve the accessibility of the goal representation whenthe goal coactivated with negative affect.To summarize, the present research confirmed the previous findings that primingthe goal of studying led to sustained mental accessibility of the goal, and theaccessibility of the goal representation would dropped to baseline (no-goal-primecondition) as a result of the coactivation of the goal and negative affect. Furthermore,it was found that meaning-oriented perceptual learning of the goal improved theaccessibility of the goal representation when the goal coactivated with negative affect,but interest-oriented perceptual learning of the goal did not.