The Effect of Positive and Negative Pictures on the Processing of Emotion-Related Words

In our study, we wanted to test whether negative and positive stimuli affect lexical decision tasks. The participants consisted of 30 CSB/SJU students (14 males and 16 females). The participants saw either negative or positive pictures. After rating the various pictures, the participants’ reaction times to words and non-words was recorded to see how priming affected their reactions. We hypothesized that emotional priming would make a difference in their reaction times to words of different emotions (positive and negative). The results demonstrated that there was not an interaction between the picture group the participants were assigned to and their reaction times to the negative and positive words