Experimental Research On The Effect Of Evaluative Conditioning On College Students’ Emotion

At present, in the studies of mood induction and affective priming, researcherstend to use direct emotional materials to prompte subjects produce emotional responseor make some preparation of emotional response, such as images with emotionalvalence, text, music, movie clips, and then have the participants complete a task inorder to study the effect of emotion to the task according to the reaction time,accuracy and other indicators to research the attitude of the subjects, etc. Directemotional material rendering makes participants easy to aware of research purpose,which might have an impedance and affect the validity of the experiment, so someresearchers have proposed that indirect means to participants make emotional reactionor emotional response preparation.Evaluative conditioning as a interventional technique in the attitude, preferenceand other fields has been very good applied, then the evaluative conditioning whethercan affect the men’s emotion? Aiming at this problem, this paper tries to make neutralstimuli into the conditioned stimuli by evaluative conditioning, and examine whetherthe conditioned stimuli can be affective priming stimuli under the condition ofexperiment. This study included three experiments.In experiment1,a extraneousneutral stimuli was paired with an emotional images and presented repeatedly duringthe study phase, and then we presented extraneous stimuli alone, finally let theparticipants rate the neutral stimuli with "happy-unhappy" according to their ownfeeling, examining the rating scores whether there was a significant difference.Experiment2was similar to experiment1, a extraneous neutral stimuli was pairedwith an emotional images and presented repeatedly during the study phase, and thenwe presented extraneous stimuli alone, and finally have the participants rate their ownemotions by the Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale(PANAS), examining thedifference between groups of the positive and negative scores. In experiment3,wealso try to be present matching material, but different from experiment1andexperiment2, experiment3adopted evaluation classification task in affective primingafter matching material, examining the reaction time under different experimentalconditions. Through these experiments, this study obtained the following conclusions:(1) Evaluative conditioning can make the neutral stimuli into conditioned stimuli withemotional valence.(2) Only on negative emotions items, girls affected by evaluative conditioning, andthe boys not only on positive emotions items but also on negative items have notfound the influence of evaluative conditioning.(3) After avaluative conditioning, neutral stimuli get the emotional valence andbecome to be conditioned stimuli.Conditioned stimuli start the affective.