Il presente lavoro si occupa di elaborazione automatica di immagini e parole con contenuto affettivo (positivo e negativo) utilizzando, nel primo esperimento il paradigma Stroop, mentre nel secondo il paradigma del priming. I risultati mostrano che i tempi di risposta sono più veloci quando si verifica una congruenza tra stimolo e contenuto affettivo (positivo/positivo o negativo/negativo) piuttosto che quando la relazione è di incongruenza(positivo/negativo).The present work deals with the automatic processing of pictures and words
associated with a particular type of affective meaning. In Experiment 1, pictures
were associated with the words according to an affective quality of the objects
represented. Participants had to perform an affective categorization task
(positive/negative) of thirty pairs of stimuli composed of pictures and words
linked in three different associations: congruent, incongruent and neutral, using
the picture/word variant of the Stroop paradigm. Results show evidence of
automatic affective processing: latency times were influenced by incongruent
distractors, and pictures were faster than words. In Experiment 2 we wanted to
see if automatic evaluation would occur even without an explicit evaluative
goal. Ten pictures presented as a prime were associated to three words: the
name of the picture, an affective meaning of the picture, and a neutral word.
Participants had to respond to a lexical decision task. Results show that latency
times of names were faster than those of emotions and neutral words; moreover,
positive emotions were processed faster than negative emotions and neutral
words. In both experiments there is clear evidence of an asymmetry concerning
the valence of the stimuli with positive stimuli being processed faster than
negative ones
