Pollyanna II: Two Types of Negativity

Abstract

Summary Subjects (N = 28) were asked to push either one of two buttons to indicate if the affective polarity of presented words was congruent with a preceding cue. In the simple congruent situation, positive words had faster response times, but in the incongruent situation the reverse was found. Incongruence interacted with affective negativity, as predicted from the psychological affect theory relating meanings of signs to associated behaviors. Linguistically marked and unmarked words that have either positive or negative affective meanings were also used in this study, and the results obtained were inconsistent with the semantic marking theory but consistent with the psychological affect theory.