Abstract
The emotional priming task was used to test between an esteem-regulation and a more general affect-regulation interpretation of a phenomenon first reported by Power and Brewin (1990). A group of normal subjects were primed with emotion terms that were related to love, fear, sadness, or anger. A target adjective was presented either 250 ms or 2000 ms later, for which the subject's task was to indicate whether or not the adjective was self-descriptive. At the longer duration for negative emotion primes, the subjects endorsed fewer negative adjectives as self-descriptive and took longer to make these endorsements. The effect, however, was obtained with all three negative emotion types and therefore both the current and previous findings are interpreted to be evidence for affect-regulation rather than more specific esteem-regulation processes.
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Power, M.J., Brewin, C.R., Stuessy, A. et al. The emotional priming task: Results from a student population. Cogn Ther Res 15, 21–31 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01172940
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01172940