The impact of automatic evaluation on mood: an awareness-dependent effect

ABSTRACT

How do affective feelings arise? Most theories consider that affective feelings result from the appraisals of an event, these appraisals being the consequences of automatic evaluations processes that can occur pre-consciously. However, studies testing this hypothesis have provided divergent results. We hypothesised that the discrepancy could be due to the visibility of the affective stimuli. We conducted two studies in which we manipulated this factor. Moreover, to exclude a possible explanation of these effects in terms of semantic priming or of experimental demand, we measured participants’ facial expressions with EMG in addition to self-report measures (BMIS). The two studies showed that repeated brief exposure to visible positive stimuli (words, Experiment 1 - pictures, Experiment 2) led to more positive feelings than exposure to negative stimuli. In contrast, when the stimuli were masked, the reversed pattern of results was observed. Results on facial EMG indicate similar effects. Consistent with the automatic evaluation hypothesis, the results suggest that assimilative effects of affective stimuli on affective feelings can be observed after a repeated brief presentation of primes, provided that the stimuli are visible. The contrast effects observed when stimuli were masked appear reliable but remain in need for further theoretical explanation.

KEYWORDS:

• Mood
• emotion feelings
• awareness
• facial electromyography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

All the data, R-scripts and stimuli for the two studies reported in this article at https://osf.io/4k5vd/?view_only=bb2b4c6f028f4d80b25751e5fabe1d81.

Notes

1 The results remained unchanged when this participant was included in the sample.

2 We also tested whether the effects remained significant in the masked condition when participants were objectively unable to discriminate the words in the forced-choice task. To do so, we computed the simple effect of valence in the masked condition when d′ for each participant was included in the analysis (crossed with all the factors). The difference between participants exposed to positive words and participants exposed to negative words remained unchanged, F(1, 156) = 6.10, p = .015, CI [−0.42; −0.047], d = 0.39.

3 The difference between participants exposed to positive and negative primes remained significant and of the same magnitude when d′ was entered in the analysis, F(1, 145) = 11.93, p < .001, CI [0.15; 0.57], d = 0.55.

4 With this sample size, we still had a power of 81.64% to detect the 2 × 2 interaction observed in Experiment 1 if this effect was true.

5 One might argue that the contrast effects observed in Exp. 2 did not remain significant when participants’ objective awareness of the primes was controlled, whereas the results remained unchanged in Exp. 1. It could be proposed that the difference between the two studies on this point is due to the use of pictures instead of words. However, such a proposal would be at odds with the results by Winkielman and Gogolushko (2018) indicating that affective pictures have more impact than affective words. Another simpler explanation is related to the awareness check used in Exp. 2. This awareness check was very conservative since a d′ of 0 indicates that the participant was unable to distinguish whether any picture was presented or not. It was at least more conservative than in Exp. 1, in which participants had to indicate which one of two orthographically close words was presented. Therefore, it is possible that in Exp. 2, a d′ of 0 was indicative of participants’ unawareness of the primes but also of a low investment in the experiment. In other words, centred on d' = 0, the effects of interest in the masked condition of Exp. 2 would have been tested for conditions of reduced attention and investment in the task, which would explain that the effects were no longer significant.

6 We are grateful to one of the referees for bringing this possibility to our attention.