Happiness and Priming Effects for Positive Words

This study investigates the hypothesis that participants who are happy show increased priming effects for positive words. The study used sixty-five students from a university in Melbourne to take part in an experiment. The results indicate that when an individual is exposed to a stimulus, it influences their response to subsequent stimuli. The study also explores the impact of cognitive load and emotional valence on priming effects.

Happiness shows increased priming effects for positive words in meaning and cognitive
load
Author’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
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Abstract
The study is focused on understanding how emotional valence impacts the way participants
respond to stimuli. When a person is happy or exposed to certain words, they respond to
situations differently unlike when a person is sad. The study sought to investigate a hypothesis
that participants that are on happiness show increased priming effects for positive words were
not supported by either condition such as cognitive load conscious stimuli and emotional
valence. The study indicates that when an individual is exposed to a stimulus, it influences a
response to subsequent stimulus. In addition, the study used sixty-five students from a university
in Melbourne to take part in an experiment. All the participants are native speakers of English
and only sixty target words were used and it was established that half of these words were
positive while the other half was negative. This shows how people respond to stimuli differently
based on the situations they encounter or get exposed to.
Introduction
The unconscious stimuli are not processes to the same degree as conscious stimuli may
influence conscious behavior. To build this argument, there is a need to understand the conscious
response stimuli and unconscious response stimuli. Conscious response to stimuli happens when
a person is awake and is aware that he/she is giving a response. For example, deciding to wear a
sweater is a response to the fact that it’s cold. Cognitively, the mind informs the body to respond
immediately to the stimuli (Bodner and Stalinsky (2008). However, research has shown that
stimuli can also be perceived when one is unaware. For example, increased pumping heartbeat
rate in order to pump blood to some body organs may be a response to the fact that those body
organs need more blood circulation at that particular time. This is known as unconscious stimuli.
Intelligence picked up during unconscious stimulation has an impact on what stimuli are

perceived during consciousness and how such a trigger perceived in awareness is felt (Merikle,
Smilek & Eastwood, 2001). Also, even though our sensory organs may choose to discriminate
some messages through some complex internal mechanisms, it is usually indicated through the
way we behave (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963). People do not actually plan to react to unconscious
stimuli the same way they react to conscious stimuli, but it’s evident that these responses are
expressed through our behaviors.
Priming is a technique which implicitly impacts the human memory. Introduction of a
stimulus definitely alters the response of the people to successive stimuli. The memory is
activated just before introduction of other stimuli, hence this kind of response. Such stimuli or
activities range from goals, concepts, stereotypes and traits. These trigger unconscious
stimulation (Neeley and Kahan (2001). For the development of character traits to behaviors,
human beings are induced socially or unsociably to adopt such traits (Shanks, Newell, Lee,
Balakrishnan, Ekelund, Cenac, Moore, 2013). In masked priming, response to a prime, say a
lorry is much faster when a related stimulus e.g. a car comes just before the target prime. Priming
comes about as a result of automatic activation of the target through prospective and
retrospective matching of semantics (Heyman, Van Rensbergen, Storms, Hutchison, & De
Deyne, 2015).
Essentially, both the conscious and unconscious stimuli are processed by the memory at
different times. Equally, priming alters completely the way the human memory works. There is a
way the mind associates with the primes unless; an individual gains a conscious awareness. A
person can repeatedly get used to upper case words, even if lower case words are used. Similarly,
the emotional valence varies depending on the cognitive load of an individual. Cognitive load is
defined as the amount of working memory resources that have been utilized and it is in three

kinds. An intrinsic cognitive load is an effort linked to a specific topic, while extraneous
cognitive load is the way a piece of information or task is presented to a student or a learner.
Thirdly, the germane cognitive load to the work a person puts into creating a schema or store
knowledge. On the other hand, emotional valence would show how a person will react to a
certain situation or a stimulus when such an individual is expressed on a continuum from
attractive to aversive or from pleasant to unpleasant to unpleasant (Citron, Gray, Critchley,
Weekes, & Ferstl, 2014). Based on the description of cognitive load if a learner is presented with
a particular stimulus in a sad way, their happy mood can definitely turn to a sad mood. Thus, the
words which have a different emotional valence are likely to be processed in a different way than
other words. If a person has a positive emotional valence like high on happiness, they will be
happier if they hear good news. But if a person is on a positive emotional valence, and they
receive negative information they will in all probability process words in a different way.
Method
Participants
Sixty-five students from a medium sized university in Melbourne participated in the
experiment. All claimed to be native speakers of English.
Materials
Word stimuli. There were sixty target words, half of which were positive and half of
which were negative. In addition to these target words there were thirty neutral words that were
used as unrelated primes. This created sixty prime target pairs for each valence, thirty of which
were related (repetition priming) and thirty were unrelated. The words in each group were
balanced on psycholinguistic characteristics including word frequency, letter length, and

association strength using the website of Landauer and Dumais. Repetition priming was used
such that each target word (in lower case) was primed by the same word in upper case (related
prime-target pair), or was paired with a prime word (in upper case) of neutral emotional valence
(unrelated prime-target pair). An example negative related repetition prime-target pair was
TORTURE-torture, and the corresponding unrelated prime-target pair was JETTY-torture.
Individual differences measures. The state items from the Spielberg State-Trait Anxiety
Inventory (SSTAI; Spielberger et al., 1983) were used to provide a measure of anxiety, which is
a negatively valenced emotion. Items from the Oxford Happiness Scale (OHS; Argyle et al.,
1995) were used to provide a measure of happiness, which is a positive valenced emotion.
Procedure
Participants reached the experiment via a link on the Learning Management System.
Participants were informed about the sequence of events in the task, and asked to respond as
quickly and as accurately as possible. For each of the three main sections of the experiment, they
completed 10 practice trials followed by 60 experimental trials. The first section of the
experiment asked participants to classify words presented on the screen as negative or positive
emotional valence (Meaning Task). The second task repeated the meaning task, but this time in a
dual task situation (Cognitive Load Task), where they were also asked to remember a pattern
containing four x's and 4 o's in various configurations. After every five trials of the meaning task,
they were asked to recall the current pattern, and then were asked to remember a new pattern.
Following this, they were presented with a list of questions that they should answer based on
their initial intuition without thinking too hard. The questions were from the two surveys, with
the questions from the SSTAI (Spielberger et al., 1983) being presented first and the OHS

second (Hills & Argyle, 2002). The experimental task and the two short surveys took about 15
minutes to complete.
All of the participants performed the sequence of tasks in the same order without
counterbalancing, beginning with the Meaning Task, followed by the Cognitive Load Task
followed by the surveys. The instructions in the Meaning Task were designed to get participants
to make a judgment about the words based on them being either of negative valence or positive
valence. In the Cognitive Load Task, the participants were performing two tasks simultaneously.
At the end of each block of trials, the participants were given performance feedback on latency
to response and accuracy.
In terms of the stimulus presentation, the main stimuli always appeared in the centre of
the screen. The timing was as follows: (a) a forward letter mask appeared for 500 ms; (b) the
prime was then presented for 48 ms; (c) a backward mask appeared for 96 ms; and (e) the target
remained on the screen until the participant responded. In the Cognitive Load Task, the pattern to
be remembered appeared on the screen for 2500 ms, then five trials of the Meaning Task
occurred, and then the participant was asked to recall the pattern. The participant had 20 seconds
to record their response, and was given feedback as to whether the entry was correct before being
shown another pattern to remember.
Results
Data were screened for response times that were less than 200 ms or greater than 1000
ms, and for incomplete data sets. The final data set contained data from 65 participants. To
confirm that participants were successfully completing the meaning judgment in both conditions

tasks, the percentage of correct responses was collated for all conditions, and presented in Table
1.
Table 1
Mean and SDs of the percentage of correct responses across conditions
Meaning Cognitive Load
Mean SD Mean SD
Percent
correct
94.10 (5.19) 94.97 (4.31)
As can be seen from this table, the mean percent correct for all tasks was well above 90%
and there were no obvious differences across the two tasks. The mean percent correct for the
pattern task was 82.11 (SD=15.63), confirming that participants were genuinely attempting the
second task in the cognitive load condition. Reaction times as a function of emotional valence,
task condition and prime relatedness are presented in Figure 1.

NEG MEAN POS MEAN NEG LOAD POS LOAD
550.00
570.00
590.00
610.00
630.00
650.00
670.00
690.00
710.00
730.00
750.00
REL UNREL
Mean Reaction Time (ms)
Figure 1. Mean reaction times and error rates for identical and unrelated prime target
pairs as a function of word valence and task condition. Note: REL=related,
UNREL=unrelated, POS=positive, NEG=negative, MEAN=meaning task,
LOAD=Cognitive load task. The error bars are +-1 SE.
As can be seen from Figure 1, reaction times were faster in the related compared to the
unrelated conditions. This difference in reaction times between related and unrelated prime-
target pairs is referred to as a priming effect. When comparing related trials between the
meaning and cognitive load conditions, reaction times appear generally faster for the load
conditions. However, for the unrelated trials, the reaction times appear slightly slower in the
load task. In terms of priming effects, it appears the largest priming effects observed were for
negative words in the cognitive load task, followed by positive words in the same task. The
priming effects for the meaning tasks appear smaller than priming effects in the load condition,
and appear relatively similar in size across valence. The same data from Figure 1 are presented to
highlight priming effects for negatively and positively valenced words for the different task
conditions in Figure 2.

MEANING LOAD
0.00
20.00
40.00
60.00
80.00
100.00
120.00
140.00
NEGATIVE VALENCE POSITIVE VALENCE
Priming Effect (ms)
Figure 2. Mean priming effect as a function of word valence and task type. The error
bars are +-1 SE.
In order to determine whether the size of the priming effects differed between the
meaning and cognitive load task, a 2 (relatedness) by 2 (task) analysis of variance (ANOVA)
was conducted. This revealed a significant main effect of relatedness (F(1, 64)=115.30, p<.001),
suggesting a significant priming effect overall, and a significant interaction effect between task
and relatedness (F(1, 64)=48.03, p<.001), with priming effects being greater in the cognitive
load condition.
A further two separate 2 (relatedness) by 2 (valence) ANOVAs were conducted to
determine whether differences in priming effects were significant between words of a positive
and negative valence for both the meaning and cognitive load conditions. For the meaning
condition, the analysis revealed a significant main effect of relatedness (F(1, 64)=31.07, p<.001)
and valence (F(1, 64)=19.27, p<.001), with RTs for negatively valenced words being faster than
for positively valenced words. However, there was no significant interaction between

relatedness and valence (F(1, 64)=.44, p=.51), suggesting that priming effects for the meaning
conditions were relatively similar across valence. For the cognitive load condition, the analysis
revealed significant main effects for both relatedness (F(1, 64)=94.34, p<.001) and valence (F(1,
64)=4.88, p=.03), again revealing RTs for negative trials were faster overall compared to positive
trials. In contrast to the meaning task, a significant interaction between relatedness and valence
was observed (F(1, 64)=22.06, p<.001), confirming the size of the priming effect for negatively
valenced words was greater than that of positively valenced words within this cognitive load task
condition.
To examine any potential correlations between priming effects and individual difference
variables, the anxiety (STAI) and happiness (OHS) scores were correlated with the size of the
priming effect across emotional valence and task condition. While there was an expected
negative correlation between anxiety and happiness, (r = -.82, p < .001), none of the correlations
of specific interest to the research hypotheses were significant.
Discussion
Summary
People high on happiness show increased priming effects for positive words were discovered to
have not been affected by either condition. Cognitive load is the mental effort used by the
participants in working memory. The ability of people to attempt the second task that involves
their mental efforts was found to be positive. The mean showed more than 94% in the two
conditions that is the meaning and the cognitive load. There was no difference of results in the
two conditions. People were able to respond faster to related questions compared to the unrelated
questions. The main reason for the observation is the priming effect. Priming effect is where one

stimulus influences another subsequent action without any intentions (Weingarten, et al., 2016).
Therefore, the reaction to related stimuli could have affected the outcome for the unrelated
stimuli without the knowledge of the participants. The comparison of the related and unrelated
trials in meaning and cognitive, the difference was observed where reaction times were faster in
load condition while the unrelated trails were slower on the load task. So, the priming effect in
load condition was bigger than in the meaning condition but almost similar in size across
valence. The priming effect differed between the two conditions where it was greater in the
cognitive load condition.
Limitations and Future research
The ethical consideration is one of the limitations of the study. Every study needs to follow
ethical guidelines and there was a limitation in defining the ethical line for the research. Further,
to engage all the participants it was a challenging task since people need to be aware of the
research and the intention of the research. Development of the questions both the related and
unrelated trials was also a limitation particularly coming up with the words. Also, generating the
hypothesis was a limitation since it required the specific details which took most of the time to
get the exert data. Despite all the limitations faced in the study they did not affect the credibility
and reliability of the study.
The future directions of the research are to investigate the methodological decisions when
covering the priming study. Going to forward, the number of trials to be used to get the best
results shall be something of great importance in future research. The control words also may
contribute to the results and therefore a different number of words could be used to confirm the
results (Tay & Ng, 2019). The researchers need to study the parameter based on perceived

individual successes and failures. A larger number of participants in the research should be used
to investigate the claims.
Relevance of the literature
The literature is important as it will be of help to the scholars. The scholars can referr to
information in literature to add their knowledge on the topic. In case there is someone who wants
to carry out future research they can rely on the information presented in the literature since it is
based on quality sources. Further, the experimental part of the study can help to suggest the best
method to carry out the study or the researcher can use a different method to verify the findings
in the research. Also, it is important to the psychology study, it can highlight how people engage
their minds in differently conditions (Bodner & Masson, 2003). In this case, the two conditions
under review is the meaning and cognitive load which show difference in the priming effect. So,
all these add up to the knowledge of psychology in trying to understand how people react in
different conditions and how they react to them.
Conclusion
The debate on how unconscious stimuli affect the conscious stimuli with no intention has
intensified in the recent years. Further, understanding the priming effect in different conditions
showed a difference, though it is slight. The trials in related and unrelated activity show a
difference where priming effect is faster in the cognitive load when the reaction is unrelated.
Also, inclusion of a large number of participants increases the generalization of the study and
also plays a key role in improving the reliability of the data. Future work should bring the theory
and the conditions of behavior occurrence as part of research attention to replicability. So, the

study gathered a lot of literature from other sources which give a background that was used as
basis for the research and identification of the gap that were researched in the study.
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