Japanese college students viewed a series of positive and negative stimulus words printed in katakana, a Japanese syllabary. Jacoby's process-dissociation procedure was used to assess the roles of conscious and unconscious processes in stimulus recognition. There was a stronger conscious recollective component in recognition of negative items and a higher correct rejection rate for negative stimuli, replicating American findings reported by Robinson-Riegler and Winton, and Ortony, Turner, and Antos. In addition, during the encoding phase, negative stimuli were associated with more eyeblinks and longer eyeblink latencies than positive stimuli; this pattern suggests greater cognitive activity in response to negative stimuli, consonant with Taylor's mobilization-minimization hypothesis. The eyeblink response, as measured in the present research, represents a new method for assessing the positive-negative asymmetries that are characteristic of the mobilization process.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Atkinson, R. C. , & Juola, J. F. (1974). Search and decision processes in recognition memory. In D. H. Krantz, R. C. Atkinson, R D. Luce, & P. Suppes (Eds.), Contemporary developments in mathematical psychology: Learning memory, and thinking (Vol. 1, pp. 242-293). San Francisco: Freeman.
2.
Curran, T. , & Hintzman, D. L. (1995). Violations of the independence assumption in process dissociation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 531-547.
3.
Dreben, E. K. , Fiske, S., & Hastie, R.(1979). The independence of evaluative and item information: Impression and recall order effects in behavior-based impression formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1758-1768.
4.
Fiske, S. T. (1980). Attention and weight in person perception: The impact of negative and extreme behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 889-906.
5.
Fogarty, C. , & Stern, J. A. (1989). Eye movements and blinks: Their relationship to higher cognitive processes. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 8, 35-42.
6.
Fukuda, K. , & Matsunaga, K. (1983). Changes in blink rate during signal discrimination tasks. Japanese Psychological Research, 25, 140-146.
7.
Gardiner, J. M. , & Java, R. I. (1990). Recollective experience in word and nonword recognition. Memory and Cognition, 18, 23-30.
8.
Gross, J.J. , & Levenson, R. W. (1993). Emotional suppression: Physiology, self-report and expressive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 970-986.
9.
Hay, J. F. , & Jacoby, L. L. (1996). Separating habit and recollection: Memory slips, process dissociations, and probability matching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 1323-1335.
10.
Jacoby, L. L. (1991). A process dissociation framework: Separating automatic from intentional uses of memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 513-541.
11.
Joordens, S. , & Merikle, P. M. (1993). Independence or redundancy? Two models of conscious and unconscious influences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 12Z462-467.
12.
Kanouse, D. E. , & Hanson, L. R, Jr. (1972). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior (pp. 47-62). Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
13.
Lacey, J. I. (1967). Somatic response patterning and stress: Some revisions of activation theory. In M. H. Appley & R Trumbull (Eds.), Psychological stress: Issues in research (pp. 14-37). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
14.
Lang, P. , Bradley, M., & Cuthbert, B. (1990). Emotion, attention, and the startle reflex. Psychological Review, 97, 377-395.
15.
Lewicka, M. , Czapinski, J., & Peeters, G. (1992). Positive-negative asymmetry or "When the heart needs a reason."European Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 425-434.
16.
Mandler, G. (1980). Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence. Psychological Review, 87, 252-271.
17.
McGuire, W. J. , & McGuire, C. V. (1992). Cognitive-versus-affective positivity asymmetries in thought systems. European Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 571-591.
18.
McGuire, W. J. , & McGuire, C. V. (1996). Enhancing self-esteem by directed-thinking tasks: Cognitive and affective positivity asymmetries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1117-1125.
19.
Merckelbach, H. , van Hout, W., van den Hout, M. A., & Mersch, P. P. (1989). Psychophysiological and subjective reactions of social phobics and normals to facial stimuli. Behavior Research and Therapy, 27, 289-294.
20.
Ohira, H. (1995). Analysis of eyeblink activity during self-referent information processing in mild depression. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 81, 1219-1229.
21.
Ohira, H. (1996a). Eyeblink activity as an index of cognitive processes. Paper presented at the 26th International Congress of Psychology, Montreal.
22.
Ohira, H. (1996b). Eyeblink activity in a word-naming task as a function of semantic priming and cognitive load. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 82, 835-842.
23.
Ortony, A. , Turner, T. J., & Antos, S. J. (1983). A puzzle about affect and recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 9, 725-729.
24.
Peeters, G. (1971). The positive-negative asymmetry: On cognitive consistency and positivity bias. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1, 455-474.
25.
Peeters, G. , & Czapinski, J. (1990). Positive-negative asymmetry in evaluations: The distinction between affective and informational negativity effects. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 33-60). Chichester, UK.: Wiley.
26.
Robinson-Riegler, G. L. , & Winton, W. M. (1996). The role of conscious recollection in recognition of affective material: Evidence for positive-negative asymmetry. Journal of General Psychology, 123, 93-104.
27.
Schuri, U. , & von Cramon, D. (1981). Heart rate and blink rate responses during mental arithmetic with and without continuous verbalization of results. Psychophysiology, 18, 650-653.
28.
Shaver, P. , Schwartz, J., Kirson, D., & O'Connor, C. (1987). Emotion knowledge: Further exploration of a prototype approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1061-1086.
29.
Stern, J. A. , Walrath, L. C., & Goldstein, R. (1984). The endogenous eyeblink. Psychophysiology, 21, 22-33.
30.
Taylor, S. E. (1991). Asymmetrical effects of positive and negative events: The mobilization-minimization hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 67-85.
31.
Toth, J. P. , Reingold, E. M., & Jacoby, L. L. (1994). Toward a redefinition of implicit memory: Process dissociations following elaborative processing and self-generation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory, and Cognition, 20, 290-303.
32.
Winton, W. M. , Putnam, L. E., & Krauss, R. M. (1984). Facial and autonomic manifestations of the dimensional structure of emotion. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 20, 195-216.
