Learning of affective meaning: revealing effects of stimulus pairing and stimulus exposure

ABSTRACT

Charles E. Osgood's theory of affective meaning defines affect as interplay of three meaning dimensions – evaluation, potency, and activity – that represent the central constituents of our affective ecology. Based on a rigorous Brunswikian sampling procedure, we selected a representative set of stimuli that mirror this ecology. A germane informative analysis explicates and corroborates the sampling approach. We then report two experiments testing whether these dimensions of affective meaning can be learnt by means of stimulus pairing and stimulus exposure. Our findings yield evidence for (1) stimulus pairing effects on evaluation and activity, and (2) stimulus exposure effects on potency and activity. Overall, the findings reveal that stimulus pairing and stimulus exposure differentially influence the learning of dimensions of affective meaning. We discuss implications of this research for current emotion theories as well as its contribution to research in the cognition–emotion interface. Finally, we argue that the implementation of representative design by virtue of Brunswikian sampling promotes theory development and opens new research avenues for an original and creative science of cognition and emotion.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective meaning
• conditioning
• mere exposure
• Brunswikian sampling
• representative design

Acknowledgements

We thank Olivier Corneille, Klaus Fiedler, and Janis Heinrich Zickfeld for constructive discussions. We thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 According to the Shapiro–Wilk test, evaluation ratings for set 1 (W = 0.93, p = .016) and set 2 (W = 0.93, p = .011) were not normally distributed. Thus, we used the Mann–Whitney test as non-parametric alternative.

2 Note that our aim was not an exhaustive coverage of all possible content categories to fully capture the entire semantic space (category-based approach). Instead, the rationale was to select a representative sample of stimuli that characterise the distribution of the EPA dimensions in affective space (cluster-based approach) to the extent that these stimuli constitute optimal exemplars to reflect its prototypical pattern. Hence, we refrained from including peculiar subdomains (e.g. erotica).

3 For the Wilcoxon test, effect size is given by the matched rank biserial correlation.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was supported by an Emmy Noether grant (HU 1978/4-1) and a Heisenberg grant (HU 1978/7-1) from the German Research Foundation awarded to Mandy Hütter.