Friday, April 28, 2006

ARTICLE UPDATE - The impact of emotion on perception: bias or enhanced processing?

Zeelenberg R, Wagenmakers EJ, Rotteveel M.

Psychological Science, 17, 287-291

Recent studies have shown that emotionally significant stimuli are often better identified than neutral stimuli. It is not clear, however, whether these results are due to enhanced perceptual processing or to a bias favoring the identification of emotionally significant stimuli over neutral stimuli. The present study used a two-alternative forced-choice perceptual identification task to disentangle the effects of bias and enhanced processing. We found that emotionally significant targets were better identified than neutral targets. In contrast, the emotional significance of the foil alternative had no effect on performance. The present results support the hypothesis that perceptual encoding of emotionally significant stimuli is enhanced.

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