Affective Priming Effect Of Erp Research

the research of affective priming has been an important area in the region of western psychology. Much of research on attitude activation has employed various experimental tasks and methods, and the result of the intensive research implies that attitudes can be activated automatically. So far three kinds of models have been proposed: a spreading of activation account, a Stroop-like response conflict, an Affective-Matching mechanism. There is still debate over the results of different studies.The present study used event-related potential(ERPs) to investigate the possible underlying neural mechanisms of the affective priming effect. Pictures were used as primes and words were used as targets to investigate the affective priming effects during evaluative categorization task in two SOA conditions. Eighteen young native-Chinese-speakers(9males,9females) participated in the study. The RT findings replicated the affective priming effect, which showed that responses to affectively congruent trials were faster than affectively incongruent trials in each SOA condition. A N400 in that larger negative amplitudes were found for incongruent pairs than congruent pairs.This finding suggests that the N400 component is not only sensitive to semantic mismatches,but is also sensitive to affective mismatches for picture prime-target pairs.