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Implicit happiness and sadness are associated with ease and difficulty: evidence from sequential priming

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Abstract

Three experiments tested the hypothesis of implicit associations between happiness and the performance ease concept and between sadness and the performance difficulty concept. All three studies applied a sequential priming paradigm: participants categorized emotion words (Experiment 1) or facial expressions (Experiment 2) as positive or negative or as referring to ease or difficulty (Experiment 3). These targets were preceded by briefly flashed ease- or difficulty-related words or neutral non-words (Experiments 1 and 2) or by happy, sad, or neutral facial expressions (Experiment 3) as primes. As predicted, all three experiments revealed increases in reaction times in the sequential priming task from congruent trials (happiness/ease and sadness/difficulty) over neutral trials to incongruent trials (sadness/ease and happiness/difficulty). The findings provide evidence for implicit associative links of happiness with ease and sadness with difficulty, as posited by the implicit-affect-primes-effort model (Gendolla, Int J Psychophysiol 86:123–135, 2012; Soc Pers Psychol Compass 9:606–619, 2015).

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Notes

  1. French words that were originally used as ease-related prime words: léger, relax, congé, evident; difficulty-related prime words: dur, examen, effort, épreuve; positive target words: gaité, heureux, joyeux, agréable; negative target words: pénible, accablé, abattu, triste.

  2. Given that we had directed hypotheses, the p values of the paired t tests are one-tailed.

  3. French words that were originally used as ease-related prime words: aisé, evident, relax, simple; difficulty-related prime words: ardu, complexe, compliqué, éprouvant.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by research grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF 100014-131760, 100014-140251) awarded to Guido H. E. Gendolla.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geneva Motivation Lab, FPSE, Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, 40, Bd. du Pont-d’Arve, 1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Ruta Lasauskaite, Guido H. E. Gendolla, Mylène Bolmont & Laure Freydefont

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  1. Ruta Lasauskaite
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  2. Guido H. E. Gendolla
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  3. Mylène Bolmont
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  4. Laure Freydefont
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Correspondence to Guido H. E. Gendolla.

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Lasauskaite, R., Gendolla, G.H.E., Bolmont, M. et al. Implicit happiness and sadness are associated with ease and difficulty: evidence from sequential priming. Psychological Research 81, 321–331 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0732-3

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