The Effects of Emotional Primers on Global Precedence
Erika McDonnell and Emma McKeon
Spring 2018
Abstract
One particular area of visual attention that is often studied by psychologists is precedence, specifically global precedence. Global precedence describes a person’s attentiveness to global features (the whole) of a stimulus as opposed to local features (the details) (May, Gutierrez, & Harsin, 1995). Emotional priming has proven to be a valuable factor in a person’s global precedence, with one study by Baumann and Kuhl (2005) finding that positive affect increases cognitive flexibility when participants were exposed to positive words. This study investigated the effects of emotional primers, specifically positive and negative images, on a person’s global precedence, as measured by the Navon task. We hypothesized that emotional priming would have an effect on global precedence, and specifically predicted that the positive primers would encourage focus on global features while negative primers would encourage focus on local features. Participants were be randomly divided into groups and were either negatively or positively primed through exposure to image slides. Immediately thereafter, participants completed the Navon task online. We conducted a two-way ANOVA, and while none of our results were significant, they did contain a trend of sad-primed participants responding faster to global target figures and happy-primed participants responding faster to local target figures.
Keywords: attention, global precedence, local precedence, visual processing, emotional priming
Limitations and Future Research
It should be noted that because this was a pilot study, we had a small sample size of only 20 participants. This was likely very limiting for our results and, considering trending results, a larger sample size might yield significant findings. We also did not account for external factors in our study, such as naps and participants’ mood. Furthermore, the priming session was only 45 seconds which is significantly less that previous studies on this topic.
In the future, we would like to employ more intensive priming sessions that involve group discussions regarding more emotionally salient subjects and a longer duration. Furthermore, in an effort to control for participants’ mood and activities such as napping, it would be beneficial to provide questionnaires regarding mood and emotion for participants both before and after the study. Lastly, exploring more nuanced emotions such as frustration and gratitude might inform the field of attention processing more, as humans are undoubtedly complex beings.
References
Baumann, N., & Kuhl, J. (2005). Positive affect and flexibility: Overcoming the precedence of global over local processing of visual information. Motivation and Emotion, 29, 123-134. doi: 10.1007/s11031-005-7957-1
May, J. G., Gutierrez, C., Harsin, C. A. (1995). The time-course of global precedence and consistency effects. International Journal of Neuroscience, 80, 237-245. doi: 10.3109/00207459508986102
