Rohr Michaela, Wentura Dirk
Cognitive Psychology Department, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jul 7;13:911068. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.911068. eCollection 2022.
Affect and emotion are essential aspects of human life. These states or feelings signal personally relevant things or situations and color our memories and thoughts. Within the area of affective or emotion processing, evaluation-the assessment of the valence associated with a stimulus or event (i.e., its positivity or negativity)-is considered a fundamental process, representing an early and crucial stage in constructivist emotion theories. Valence evaluation is assumed to occur automatically when encountering a stimulus. But does this really apply always, even if we simply see a word? And if so, what exactly is processed or activated in memory? One approach to investigating this evaluative process uses behavioral priming paradigms and, first and foremost, the evaluative priming paradigm and its variants. In the present review, we delineate the insights gained from this paradigm about the relation of affect and emotion to cognition and language. Specifically, we reviewed the empirical evidence base with regard to this issue as well as the proposed theoretical models of valence evaluation, specifically with regard to the nature of the representations activated such paradigms. It will become clear that affect and emotion are foremost (and, perhaps, even exclusively) triggered by evaluative priming paradigms in the sense that semantic affective knowledge is activated. This knowledge should be modeled as being active in working memory rather than in long-term memory as was assumed in former models. The emerging evidence concerning the processing of more specific emotion aspects gives rise to the assumption that the activation of these semantic aspects is related to their social importance. In that sense, the fast and (conditionally) automatic activation of valence and other emotion aspects in evaluative priming paradigms reveals something about affect and emotion: Valence and specific emotion aspects are so important for our daily life that encountering almost any stimulus entails the automatic activation of the associated valence and other emotion aspects in memory, when the context requires it.
情感和情绪是人类生活的重要方面。这些状态或感受标志着与个人相关的事物或情境，并为我们的记忆和思想染上色彩。在情感或情绪处理领域，评价——对与刺激或事件相关的效价（即其积极或消极性）的评估——被视为一个基本过程，代表了建构主义情绪理论中的一个早期且关键的阶段。人们认为，遇到刺激时会自动进行效价评估。但这真的总是适用吗？即使我们只是看到一个单词？如果是这样，记忆中究竟被处理或激活了什么？一种研究这种评价过程的方法是使用行为启动范式，首先是评价性启动范式及其变体。在本综述中，我们阐述了从该范式中获得的关于情感和情绪与认知及语言关系的见解。具体而言，我们回顾了关于这个问题的实证证据基础以及提出的效价评估理论模型，特别是关于此类范式中激活的表征的性质。很明显，情感和情绪首先（甚至可能仅仅）是由评价性启动范式触发的，因为语义情感知识被激活了。这种知识应该被建模为在工作记忆中活跃，而不是像以前的模型所假设的那样在长期记忆中活跃。关于更具体的情绪方面处理的新证据引发了这样一种假设，即这些语义方面的激活与其社会重要性有关。从这个意义上说，评价性启动范式中效价和其他情绪方面的快速且（有条件地）自动激活揭示了一些关于情感和情绪的信息：效价和特定的情绪方面对我们的日常生活非常重要，以至于当情境需要时，遇到几乎任何刺激都会在记忆中自动激活相关的效价和其他情绪方面。
