Abstract
We reasoned that if speakers must decide how long to reflect and how much to say about a topic, they use such guidelines as topic valence and valent situational distractors that compete for attention. We hypothesized that latency and extent of verbalization would be greater if topic valence were relatively negative, in that negative topics are “weightier” and hence deserve longer reflection and verbalization. Similarly, a negative distractor would cast a weightier aura over the task, with parallel effects. While subjects were imagining the visual scene evoked by a certain pleasant or unpleasant topic, a pleasant or unpleasant picture appeared toward the left or right, on a screen. After the picture faded subjects described the topic-evoked image. Topic valence had no effect on speech latency, whereas picture valence had the predicted effect. Negative topics increased latency of visual attention to pictures, though, as expected, subjects then looked sooner at negative pictures. Both topic valence and picture valence had the predicted effects on extent of verbalization. As predicted, too, unpleasant pictures elicited relatively negative evaluations of topic-evoked images.
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The authors are indebted to Carole Tabor for helping with data collection, David Schubot for integrating the various pieces of electric equipment and building some of the apparatus, and Alice Bernstein for coding some of the EOG recordings. We are also grateful to Leonard Martin for his most helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and to the journal's reviewers for their useful suggestions.
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Rosen, S., Grandison, R.J. Effects of topic valence and pictorial distractor valence on verbalizing and evaluating topic-evoked visual imagery. Motiv Emot 18, 249–268 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02254831
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02254831