Emotional influences on word recognition

Abstract

We asked whether agreement between the affective quality of a word and a subject’s emotional mood would cause faster identification of that word. In Experiment 1, subjects induced to feel happy or angry were required to choose which of two words had been briefly presented. The target and distractor words were pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Mood-congruent target words were not correctly selected more often than neutral or incongruent targets. In Experiment 2, happy or angry subjects tried to identify neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant words presented for brief durations that lengthened progressively until each word was identified. Again, recognition thresholds for mood-congruent words were not lower than those for neutral or incongruent words.