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Abstract
An Affective Simon Task was administered to English-speaking monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, in order to assess the extent to which valence and emotionality are automatically processed when reading a word. Participants classified words in white on the basis of valence (positive or negative), or classified them on the basis of color (blue or green) via a key press. Words were either emotion words (e.g., happy; anxious) or emotion-laden words (e.g., dream; shark). Bilinguals viewed words in both English and Spanish. While only negative emotion words produced the typical congruency effects, both negative and positive emotion-laden words produced significant Simon effects, in monolinguals. Similar effects emerged for bilinguals, in both languages. Results indicate that emotion word type moderates the Affective Simon Task and also provide a demonstration of these effects in bilinguals. Overall, the data also provide further evidence that affective coding in both a dominant and a subordinate language can influence subsequent responses in seemingly irrelevant tasks. Results are discussed within a framework focused on the representation of emotion in both monolingual and bilingual speakers.
Keywords
Affective Simon Task, bilingualism, emotion-laden words, emotion word processing, Simon Effect
Investigations on the processing and representation of emotion have increased in recent years, as researchers attempt to explore the degree to which stimulus valence (positive, negative, neutral) can be processed automatically. In a paradigm such as affective priming, for example, a positively or negatively valenced target is facilitated when preceded by a similarly valenced prime (see e.g., Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986; see also Altarriba & Canary, 2004, for a bilingual demonstration of this effect). That is, positive primes facilitate responses to positive targets, and negative primes facilitate responses to negative targets. These results have been shown in situations in which the delay between the onset of the prime and the presentation of the target (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA) was 300 ms (milliseconds) or less, and even in situations where the participants are asked to ignore the prime. This type of priming is fast and efficient, involuntary, and goal-independent. In short, it is quite automatic and modulated primarily by valence. Similarly, the emotional Stroop effect has been explored for what it might tell us regarding the automatic capture of attention of the emotional components...