Stimulus–Response compatibility based on affective arousal

Abstract

Participants responded by producing weak or strong forces to pictures that varied with respect to affective arousal and horizontal position. The task relevance of these stimulus dimensions was manipulated between different groups of participants, with Stimulus–Response mapping varying between blocks of trials. The combination of the respectively task-irrelevant stimulus features with responses varied unpredictably on a trial-to-trial basis. In addition, the valence of the pictures and the combination of valence with response force were varied. When affective arousal was task relevant, there was an advantage of the pairing arousing→strong, not arousing→weak over the reverse mapping. No such affectively-based compatibility effect emerged when arousal was task irrelevant. In addition, effects of arousal were modulated by valence, but only when arousal was the relevant stimulus dimension.

Keywords:

• Automaticity
• SR compatibility
• Arousal
• Valence
• Response
• Force

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rainer Flöring for setting up the apparatus, and to Nicolas Ludolph for programming the software and running the experiment.

Notes

¹A combined analysis of both sources of variance would have resulted in empty cells. For example, a combination of the mapping arousing→strong, not arousing→weak and the combination negative→weak, positive→strong precluded the occurrence of highly arousing negative pictures because “arousing” and “negative” were associated with different responses.

²In order to check whether the modulation of the Arousal Compatibility effect as a function of Task was due to the differences in absolute RT between the two tasks, I computed the size of the Arousal Compatibility effect separately for each individual quartile of the RT distribution. With the Arousal Task, the mean effect of Arousal Compatibility amounted to 57, 86, 108, and 145 ms for the first, second, third, and fourth quartile. With the Position Task, the corresponding values were 2, −1, −1, and 4 ms.