Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Does affective context automatically activate congruent information in memory (e.g. positive context/ positive information) and/or inhibit incongruent information (e.g. negative context/positive information)? Context was elicited by presenting either a positive, negative, or neutral facial expression briefly on a computer screen. Immediately after setting the context, subjects saw a positive, negative or neutral word and had to pronounce it as quickly as possible. The experiment was designed to eliminate subject strategies. The results indicated that subjects pronounce words faster in a congruent context, relative to a neutral baseline. There was no evidence of a slowing down in the incongruent context. These findings suggest that affect automatically activates congruent information in memory. Results are discussed in relation to previous mood findings which suggest that affective priming is not found in semantic tasks.