Is The "neutral" Picture Really Neutral? Th

According to the emotional dimension theory (Osgood,1966), emotion pictures could be classified into positive, negative and neutral ones according to the dimension of valence, arousal and dominance. Neutral pictures, usually with a medium level of valence, low level of arousal and high level of dominance, are commonly used to calm down individual’s emotion and avoid habituation or adaptation to the emotional stimuli. There are eight categories of neural pictures in the Affective Picture System including the nature, plants, animals, humans, culture, death-waste, food and computer graphics. There were no studies systematically investigating the effects of these different categories of neutral pictures on the evocation of calm-mood, especially the comparison of the undergraduates and the pre-school students. Therefore, the current study aimed to analyze that which categories of neutral pictures can better induce individual’s calm-mood on the perspective of undergraduates and pre-school children.In experiment1, we collected the rating of undergraduate students (78males and108females) on calm-mood degree for135neutral pictures of eight categories. The neural pictures were selected from the simple version (Huang&Luo,2004) of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). In experiment2, we selected pictures with high calm-mood degree on the basis of the ratings from the experiment1as stimuli, to investigate the ratings of calm-mood degree of3-6years old pre-school students (67boys and56girls).The results showed that:1) For the undergraduates, plants, nature and culture picture categories induced calm-mood best, followed by human, computer graphics and food categories. The animals and death-waste categories were the worst. For the pre-school children, food category induced calm-mood worst.2) There were gender differences in rating degree of calm-mood for death-waste, people and animals categories among the undergraduates. Specifically, males showed higher rating degree of the calm-mood than females. However, no gender difference was found among the pre-school children.3) For the pre-school children, we found grade difference in calm-mood rating degree in death-waste, nature and culture categories. Higher grade students showed higher calm-mood degree than the lower grades generally. These results indicate that the world in the eyes of undergraduates and pre-school children were not exactly the same:neutral pictures for the undergraduates were given emotional colors in the eyes of pre-school children. Neural pictures were difficult to evoke calm-mood for per-school students. For these children, pictures were positive regardless of their calm-mood degree of adults.