Automatic vigilance for negative words in lexical decision and naming: comment on Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006).

摘要: An automatic vigilance hypothesis states that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli, and this attention valence disrupts the processing of other stimulus properties. Thus, words typically elicit slower color naming, word lexical decisions than neutral or positive words. Larsen, Mercer, Balota (2006) analyzed stimuli from 32 published studies, they found was confounded with several factors known affect recognition. Indeed, these covaried out, Larsen et al. no evidence vigilance. The authors report a more sensitive analysis 1011 Results revealed small but reliable effect, such (e.g., “shark”) naming “beach”). Moreover, relation between recognition categorical rather linear; extremity word’s did not its This effect attributable length, frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, contextual diversity, first phoneme, arousal. present provides most powerful demonstration date.