Revisiting the affective Simon effect

摘要

We replicated the affective Simon effect found by De Houwer and Eelen (1998) in a situation in which participants had to respond by saying positive or negative depending on the grammatical category of the stimulus words while ignoring their affective connotation. Our results show that the affective Simon effect can be modulated by varying the proportion of experimental stimuli bearing a strongly polarised affective connotation. We propose that affective Simon effect depends at least in part on participants' awareness of the correspondence between the affective connotation of the words and the responses. We also submit that this effect might not be specific to affective processing in that it is a token of a vast category of congruity effects that can be based on any kind of meaning of the stimuli, whether semantic or affective.