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Affective Meaning (affective + meaning)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	60%

Selected Abstracts

Preference judgements involve a network of structures within frontal, cingulate and insula cortices

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE, Issue 5 2009
Amir M. Chaudhry
Abstract Environmental stimuli constantly compete for human attention and in many cases decisions are made based on the affective meaning they convey. Although the network of structures involved in processing affective value has been well described, the specific contribution of these structures to the process by which affective value guides decision making is less well understood and is the focus of the present study. Thus, subjects read descriptions of individually tailored holidays, varying in incentive value and then made preference judgements, cognitive judgements or no decision. Choices made from an affective perspective, compared with those made from a cognitive perspective, activated a region of the anterior insula/operculum and also the anterior cingulate cortex. Furthermore, activity in perigenual, anterior cingulate cortex was correlated with subjective ratings of incentive value. In contrast, medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and a region of posterior ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), bordering on the insula, were found to be more active when affective stimuli guided response selection than when no selection was made. However, only the activity in the ventrolateral PFC was specific to response selection based on affective compared with cognitive judgements. It is proposed that the necessary introspection required to make subjective preference judgements is provided by the insula and cingulate cortices, while the medial OFC and posterior ventrolateral PFC/insula cortices contribute to stimulus evaluation and motivational aspects of response selection, respectively. [source]

On the saliency of negative stimuli: Evidence from attentional blink1

JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2004
Tokihiro Ogawa
Abstract:, When people are asked to detect two targets from a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream, impairment of recognition of the second target (T2) can be observed if the T2 is presented several hundred milliseconds later than the first target (T1). This phenomenon is known as attentional blink, and is considered to reflect some temporal characteristic of the attentional process. The aim of the present study was to use the attentional blink paradigm to examine whether the affective meaning of the stimuli could affect the magnitude of attentional blink. In Experiment 1, the valence of the T2 (neutral, positive, and negative) was manipulated. Significant T2 detection deficit was observed with neutral and positive T2 but not with negative T2. Experiment 2 demonstrated that non-significant attentional blink in negative T2 in Experiment 1 could be attributed to the negative affective meaning of T2. Results are discussed in terms of the high saliency of negative information. [source]

Fleeting images: A new look at early emotion discrimination

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 2 2001
Markus Junghöfer
The visual brain quickly sorted stimuli for emotional impact despite high-speed presentation (3 or 5 per s) in a sustained, serial torrent of 700 complex pictures. Event-related potentials, recorded with a dense electrode array, showed selective discrimination of emotionally arousing stimuli from less affective content. Primary sources of this activation were over the occipital cortices, extending to right parietal cortex, suggesting a processing focus in the posterior visual system. Emotion discrimination was independent of formal pictorial properties (color, brightness, spatial frequency, and complexity). The data support the hypothesis of a very short-term conceptual memory store (M. C. Potter, 1999),shown here to include a fleeting but reliable assessment of affective meaning. [source]

Analysis of affective factors of colored three-dimensional shapes

ELECTRONICS & COMMUNICATIONS IN JAPAN, Issue 5 2009
Takeshi Miura
Abstract "Shape" has been regarded as one of the fundamental elements of plastic art, together with "color" and "material." The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of shape on affective meanings, when the visual stimulus is a three-dimensional shape. The semantic differential technique is used for the extraction of affective factors, with samples of stimuli produced by three-dimensional computer graphics (3DCG). Since it is difficult to separate the stimuli of shape and color in the visual stimulus of a three-dimensional shape, both single-color experiments and colored three-dimensional-shape experiments were performed; the influence of shape is investigated by comparison of the respective results. A total of 33 single colors and 132 colored three-dimensional shapes with simple geometrical form (cube, cylinder, cone, and sphere) were used as samples. Four factors are extracted for single-color stimuli by factor analysis: "showiness," "pleasantness," "strength," and "warmth." The factor of "looseness" is also added to the above factors in the case of a three-dimensional-shape stimulus. The following tendencies of these factors are obtained: among the single-color factors, the factors of "pleasantness" and "warmth" show marked variation caused by the influence of shape, and the factor score of "looseness" depends on the straightness or roundness of the shape. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 92(5): 41,54, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecj.10001 [source]