Interactive effects of emotional valence and processing fluency on stimulus evaluation

Perceptual fluency is the subjective ease with which people can process incoming information. Several studies have shown that high perceptual fluency is affectively positive: experimental participants preferred stimuli that were easy to process. However, the existing studies with single exposure of stimuli used only neutral stimuli, leaving open whether affective content would moderate the effects of fluency on affective preference. Studies on repeated exposure of stimuli addressed this issue, but the res ults so far are contradictory. One reason for the contradictory findings lie in the different wording of assessments of affective preference: some expressions, like "attractive" or "beautiful", may elicit a focus on form, yielding more positive evaluation s for negative stimuli with higher fluency. Other expressions, like "liking" or "prefer", may elicit a focus on content, yielding more negative evaluations for negative stimuli with higher fluency. We test this assumptions in two series of experiments. In one series, we present pictures of affectively negative stimuli, such as guns. We manipulate perceptual fluency, e.g., by figure-ground contrast, and question focus, e.g., by a priming manipulation in one experiment and by "pretty" versus "liking" in another. In another series, we present pictures of faces with emotionally positive or negative (e.g., angry) expressions. Again, we manipulate perceptual fluency, e.g., by figure-ground contrast, and question focus, e.g., by a priming manipulation in on e experiment and by "pretty" versus "liking" in another. In sum, these findings extend existing findings on processing fluency. For the first time, we expect to demonstrate negative consequences of perceptual fluency on affective judgments if the emotion al valence of a stimulus is negative and if the question focus is on content rather than form.