| The affective primacy hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980) contends that people are able to react to the affective qualities (positive-negative) of a stimulus before they are able to react to non-affective qualities. Previous experiments (e.g., Murphy, 1990; Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) utilizing facial expressions as affective primes, find strong evidence for affective primacy. The present set of experiments extends the scope of affective primacy to the lexical domain. Four experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that people are able to react to the affective quality of a word before they are able to react to the word's meaning. Two judgment tasks (Experiments 1 and 2) and a priming task (Experiments 3 and 4) were employed. When participants were exposed to word pairs for brief durations (Experiment 1, word pair shown for 150 msec; Experiment 2, prime word shown for 50 msec, followed by target word), they were faster to make valence judgments about the word pairs than they were to make judgments about the meanings of the two words. Experiments 3 and 4 utilized a pronunciation task to compare affective and semantic priming effects at two prime durations. When the prime words were exposed for a long duration (500 msec, Experiment 3), only semantic priming effects emerged. However, when the prime words were shown briefly (34 msec, Experiment 4), only affective priming effects emerged. The dissociation between the affective and semantic priming effects provides strong evidence that affect and cognition are processed by independent and partially separate systems. The results of Experiments 1-4 provide support for Zajonc's (1980) affective primacy hypothesis and extend previous findings of affective primacy (e.g., Murphy, 1990; Murphy, Monahan, & Zajonc, 1995; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993) into the lexical domain. |
