The Effect Of Different Approach-motivated Positive Affect On The Processing Of English Emotional Words And Its Gender Difference

Emotion can affect people’s cognitive activities and plays an important role in life.And attention is the first step when emotion affects cognition.The results of existing studies have shown that positive emotions can promote attention,memory and other cognitive activities,while negative emotions can hinder these cognitive activities.However,according to the motivational dimensional model of emotion proposed by Gable and Harmon-Jones(2010b),emotion includes motivation as well as valence and arousal.There is no discussion of the interaction between emotion and motivation and whether such interaction is gender-specific.In general psychological and cognitive theory,emotion and motivation interact,and the effect may be different between males and females.Therefore,the present study tried[1] to probe into this dimension.Through the processing of English emotional words,the study investigated the arousal of positive emotions by different motivation intensities and gender differences.Thus,the influence of different motivation intensities on language cognitive processing was revealed.The participants of the two experiments were middle school students.The first experiment included the selection and evaluation of emotion-inducing materials—the pictures induced the emotional motivation.And the second experiment approached to the influence of attention to emotional words with the approaching positive emotions with different motivation intensities.The interference effect of emotional pictures was tested by the match of the speedy presented pictures and the emotional words.More specifically,the interference effect of emotional pictures on emotional words was judged by the quick visual selection of two kinds of emotional words: positive words or negative words.The two experiments showed the following results.Firstly,pictures could effectively induce positive emotions of different motivation levels.Specifically,pictures of delicious food could induce high motivation to approach positive emotions;pictures associated with pleasant scenery could induce low motivation to approach positive emotions;and pictures of objects would elicit neutral emotions.Secondly,for the approaching positive emotions with high motivation intensity,the attention would be attached to positive words while for the approaching positive emotions with low motivation intensity,the attention would be drawn to negative words.In addition,in the case of the approaching positive emotions with high motivation intensity,the attention range would be extended and the inhibition to irrelevant stimuli be enhanced.Thirdly,in the case of the approaching positive emotions with low motivation intensity,males tended to pay more attention to positive words and less attention to negative words than females did.This study revealed that emotions had a different motivation intensity that would induced positive emotions thus produced a significant effect on the selection of related emotional words.The study also revealed that males had stronger unconscious self-regulation ability than females.The present study provided some theoretical implications for students’ emotional regulation,attention selection and foreign language learning efficiency in English teaching in middle schools.