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Title: Spring Break or Heart Break? Extending Valence Bias to Emotional Words
Ambiguous stimuli are useful for assessing emotional bias. For example, surprised faces could convey a positive or negative meaning, and the degree to which an individual interprets these expressions as positive or negative represents their “valence bias.” Currently, the most well-validated ambiguous stimuli for assessing valence bias include nonverbal signals (faces and scenes), overlooking an inherent ambiguity in verbal signals. This study identified 32 words with dual-valence ambiguity (i.e., relatively high intersubject variability in valence ratings and relatively slow response times) and length-matched clearly valenced words (16 positive, 16 negative). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that the words-based valence bias correlated with the bias for faces, r s (213) = .27, p < .001, and scenes, r s (204) = .46, p < .001. That is, the same people who interpret ambiguous faces/scenes as positive also interpret ambiguous words as positive. These findings provide a novel tool for measuring valence bias and greater generalizability, resulting in a more robust measure of this bias.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1752848
NSF-PAR ID:
10219594
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Social Psychological and Personality Science
ISSN:
1948-5506
Page Range / eLocation ID:
194855062097229
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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