Is the sunny side up and the dark side down? Effects of stimulus type and valence on a spatial detection task

ABSTRACT

In verbal communication, affective information is commonly conveyed to others through spatial terms (e.g. in “I am feeling down”, negative affect is associated with a lower spatial location). This study used a target location discrimination task with neutral, positive and negative stimuli (words, facial expressions, and vocalizations) to test the automaticity of the emotion-space association, both in the vertical and horizontal spatial axes. The effects of stimulus type on emotion-space representations were also probed. A congruency effect (reflected in reaction times) was observed in the vertical axis: detection of upper targets preceded by positive stimuli was faster. This effect occurred for all stimulus types, indicating that the emotion-space association is not dependent on sensory modality and on the verbal content of affective stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• space
• words
• faces
• vocalizations
• reaction times

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Grants IF/00334/2012, PTDC/MHN PCN/3606/2012, and PTDC/MHC-PCN/0101/2014 funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT) and FEDER (European Regional Development Fund) through the European programs QREN (National Strategic Reference Framework), and COMPETE (Operational Programme “Thematic Factors of Competitiveness”), awarded to A.P.P. We are grateful to all the participants of this study for their contribution to science. We are also extremely grateful to three reviewers who provided helpful comments on a draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Contributors

Maria Amorim and Ana P. Pinheiro developed the study concept and design. Maria Amorim collected the data. The two authors collaborated in data analysis and in writing the first draft of the manuscript. They equally contributed to and have approved the final version of the manuscript.

ORCID

Ana P. Pinheiro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7981-3682

Notes

1. Even though we tried to use an equivalent number of male and female non-linguistic vocalizations, our stimuli set contained more female vocalizations as our main selection criterion involved choosing the vocalizations with the highest emotion recognition rates (female vocalizations presented higher recognition rates for the emotions – Vasconcelos et al., 2017). However, no significant effects were expected as a function of speaker's gender: Cattaneo et al. (2014) found no differences in line bisection when participants were listening to a female vs. male vocalization.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grant numbers IF/00334/2012, PTDC/MHN PCN/3606/2012 and PTDC/MHC-PCN/0101/2014 funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – FCT) and FEDER (European Regional Development Fund) through the European programs QREN (National Strategic Reference Framework), and COMPETE (Operational Programme “Thematic Factors of Competitiveness”), awarded to A.P.P.