Assessing valence indirectly and online

Abstract

In the present experiment, participants performed a reaction time task that was modelled after the affective priming procedure and was designed to track (changes in) the evaluative meaning of the conditioned stimuli (CSs) in a differential fear acquisition and subsequent extinction procedure indirectly and online. We asked participants to classify a visual probe that could appear during the reinforced CS and the unreinforced CS. The visual probe consisted of five positive or five negative smiley faces. Results indicated that the online task succeeded in tracing (shifts in) valence; superior performance was observed when CS and probe were congruent in affective meaning as compared to when they were incongruent. This congruency effect was not only observed at the end of the acquisition phase but also at the beginning and end of the extinction phase, which suggests that the acquired valence of the CSs survived extinction.

Keywords:

• Indirect measurement
• Online measurement
• Stimulus valence
• Extinction

Acknowledgements

Trinette Dirikx is postdoctoral researcher for the Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders, Belgium. This research was supported by Grant G.0268.06 of the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders) and by a University of Leuven grant GOA/2007/03.