水平空间与情绪效价联结效应的产生机制

The Mechanism Underlying the Associations between Emotional Valence and Horizontal Space

采用词汇效价判断任务,考察水平空间与情绪效价联合效应的产生机制。实验1在被试双手正常放置条件下考察了词汇效价与水平空间联结效应的存在;实验2则要求被试双手交叉放置,以考察当反应手和反应键的空间信息冲突时水平空间与情感效价的关联现象;实验3则进一步考排除反应手的参与,以考察口头报告的反应方式是否对两者的联结效应产生影响。结果表明,不同反应方式下均存在空间情感效价的联结,且此联结更多是反应选择极性编码的结果。

It was obvious that there was an association of emotional valence with horizontal physical space. According to the body-specificity hypothesis, this association is related to the handedness. People associate positive entities with the side of space surrounding the dominant hand and negative entities with the space surrounding the non-dominant hand. So the Right-handers have the pattern of right-good/left-bad. However, according to the polarity correspondence principle, participants in binary classification tasks code more salient stimuli as ＂＋＂ polarity, while another is marked as ＂-＂ polarity. Positive words are salient because they are more common and will be the default for the ＂＋＂ polarity and negative stimuli as polarity. Also, the dominant hand is more likely to be regarded as the salient response to be coded as ＂＋＂ polarity, while another is coded as ＂-＂ polarity. And it assumes that stimulus and response alternatives with the same coding are associated together and this interaction was driven by the salient stimulus. This theory can better explain why only the significant connection between right and good appeared in some studies while the significant connection between left and bad did not appear. The dispute between the two theories is that whether there is the association of negative valence with the space surrounding the non-dominant hand. So the aim of the present study was to investigate the association between emotional valence and physical space under different response modes, and try to illustrate the generation mechanism underlying this association. Three experiments were conducted in this present study. In experiment 1, a valence judgment task of emotional words was adopted under normal hand placements conditions. Under the normal hand placement conditions, the hand and side carried the congruent information. Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1 except that participants needed to keep their hands crossed. Experiment 3 had the same task with experiment 1 and 2 but the response hands were removed. The way to respond was oral, which needed participants to say left/right to the valence of the stimulus by the Serial response Box. The result of Experiment 1 indicated that for the positive words, the RTs of right hands were markedly shorter than of left hands, whereas for the negative words, the RTs of right hands were not. Experiment 2 indicated that when the participants kept their hands crossed, and only the association of positive valence with the right hand was significant. In Experiment 3, although without response bands, there were still the associations between valence and horizontal space. Right-handers connected the right physical space with positive valence. There was still no significant association between negative valence and left space. In conclusion, the association between emotional valence and horizontal physical space also happened in the valence judgment task with Chinese valence words. In particular, the compatibility effect emerged between positive valence and ＂right＂. This connection depends on the polarity of the stimulus and response code. The above results fit the polarity correspondence coding principle well.