The Development And Eye-Movements Studies On The Effect Of Affective Priming

Affective priming is an active psychological research field in recent 20 years. But at present,researches on affective priming still have different views as well as many problems which need to be studied further.Our study aimed at exploring affective priming effect and its developmental features.Eye-tracking technique and fast affective priming paradigm were used to investigate affective priming effect during sentence reading on eye movement control.This study included two experiments.The first one was a 3(participants' age: forth graders,fifth graders,seventh graders)×3(priming words:positive,negative and neutral)×2(target words:positive,negative)×2(SOA:150ms,300ms) mixed design.We used Chinese words as experimental materials,and presented priming materials by vision and selected 33 forth graders,32 fifth graders and 50 seventh graders randomly as subjects.The aim of this experiment was to explore if affective priming effect occurred in target words judgment in evaluative categorization task, and if there are developmental features of affective priming effect.The second one was a 2(priming materials:positive,negative)×2(target words:positive,negative) within subjects design.We used Chinese sentences which included affective words as experimental materials and selected 25 sophomores randomly as subjects to investigate affective priming effect through eye-tracking technique.The results were concluded as follows:(1) Significant affective priming effect occurred on the judgment of Chinese words in evaluative categorization task.(2) SOA had significant influence on target words judgment of affective priming in evaluative categorization task.(3) Priming words' effect influenced the judgment on affective words.Time that judgment on target words needed was significantly faster under the positive priming words condition than under the neutral and negative priming words conditions.(4) Time that seventh graders needed to judge target words was much faster than forth and fifth graders in evaluative categorization task.(5) Affective priming effect occurred when target words was judged by seventh graders and fifth graders in evaluative categorization task.(6) There was faint affective priming effect when sophomores participated in the experiment of fast affective priming paradigm.