Abstract
Researchers have been at odds on whether affective or semantic priming is faster or stronger. The present study selects a series of facial expression photos and words, which have definite emotional meaning or gender meaning, to set up experiment including both affective and semantic priming. The intensity of emotion and gender information in the prime as well as the strength of emotional or semantic (in gender) relationship between the prime and the target is matched. Three groups of participants are employed separately in our experiment varied with stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) as 50, 250 or 500 ms. The results show that the difference between two types of priming effect is revealed when the SOA is at 50 ms, in which the affective priming effect is presented when the prime has negative emotion. It indicates that SOA can affect the comparison between the affective and semantic priming, and the former takes the priority in the automatic processing level.
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Acknowledgments
This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31271107, 61572076), Humanities and Social Science Project of the China Educational Ministry (11YJC190010), Humanities and Social Science Project of the China Educational Ministry (15YJC190010), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Grant (No. 2015M570940), BIT Fundamental Research Grant (No. 20150442009).
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Handling Editor: Bruno Laeng (University of Oslo).
Reviewers: Giulia Prete (University of Chieti, Italy), Michaela Rohr (Saarland University).
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Jiang, Z., Qu, Y., Xiao, Y. et al. Comparison of affective and semantic priming in different SOA. Cogn Process 17, 357–375 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0771-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0771-8