Words’ Origin of an Affective State, but not Valence, Shape the Reaction Latencies in a Word-Sign Choosing Ambiguous Task

Abstract

This paper presents data concerning the impact of word connotations differing in valence and origin on ambiguous decisions. The origin factor describes engagement of automatic vs. controlled processing mechanisms in formation of an emotional reaction to the stimuli (words, in this case). Other potentially important factors such as arousal, concreteness, frequency of appearance in language and length were matched across conditions. The task was introduced as intuition related and participants were supposed to guess which one of two hexagrams, introduced as pictorial symbols from an East Asian language, best suited the meaning of certain words. The expectation was that the origin of a word’s affective connotations would influence decision making speed, and reaction latencies would be longer for reflectively originated words compared to automatically originated ones. The rationale for such a hypothesis is that reflective origins of emotional reactions are part of rational, multi-criteria processing, representing more complex mechanisms than automatic origins of emotional reactions based on experiential, automatic appraisals, representing less complex processing. For reflectively originated words, reaction latencies for word-sign matching tasks were longer than for automatically originated ones. No valence effects were found. Also no effects of the manipulations were found for time spent look at the words or location (top or bottom) of the chosen response in an ambiguous word-symbol matching task. This suggests that, indeed, origin influences only the type of processing that subsequently occurs, namely whether choices reflected systematic or heuristic processing.