The way that emotions are processed in the brain has been widely debated. The two leading hypotheses are the cognitive appraisal viewpoint (Lazarus, 1982) and the affective primacy hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980). The former argues that higher cortical structures are needed to evaluate affective stimuli whereas the latter asserts that humans can use information only processed at the subcortical level to influence behavior. The current study tested the presence of this subcortical pathway by using an affective priming task developed by Murphy and Zajonc (1993). Happy and angry faces were presented for 4 ms before the presentation of a neutral stimulus (Chinese Ideograph) that participants were asked to rate based on how much they liked each one. Individuals do not report conscious awareness of primes presented at this suboptimal speed. In a young adult sample, participants rated ideographs preceded by happy primes significantly higher than those preceded by angry primes. Also, the priming effect was only observed in participants who reported a high positive mood. Next, when primes were presented in the left or right hemifield priming was only found in the right hemifield, and was driven by increased ratings for ideographs preceded by happy primes. Patients with epilepsy who have undergone a temporal lobectomy provide a unique opportunity to study emotional processing. In this procedure, not only is the seizure focus (typically the hippocampus) removed, but the amygdala and surrounding areas of the mesial temporal lobe are removed as well. Nine patients post right temporal lobectomy and three patients post left temporal lobectomy completed the study and did not show an effect of priming. However, 21 pre-surgical epilepsy patients were found to give higher liking ratings to ideographs preceded by angry primes as compared to those preceded by happy primes. Overall, these results support the affective primacy hypothesis however they also suggest that patients with temporal lobe dysfunction may process emotional stimuli differentially from controls. In this population, ideographs preceded by angry primes were rated as more liked than those preceded by happy primes. Directions for future studies to clarify the role of the amygdala in emotional processing are discussed. / text

Priming refers to a change in the ability to identify, produce, or classify a stimulus as a result of a previous encounter with the same or a related stimulus. Recent neuroimaging studies often found behavioral priming to co-occur with a reduction in neural activations in various cortical regions, which is called repetition suppression. It is thought that repetition suppression is closely related to behavioral priming, and may even be the underlying neural mechanism that supports priming. However, current literature still has several unsolved questions about the relationship between repetition suppression and priming. The present dissertation set out to further elucidate their relationship. In Study 1, a mirror-word identification task was used to limit overlap between study and test to a primarily perceptual level with little or no conceptual overlap nor top-down modulation. Repetition suppression was found in visual perceptual and frontal phonological regions involved at both study and test, supporting a "component process" view that repetition suppression and priming can occur at a perceptual level with limited conceptual or top-down processes involved. In Study 2, three perceptual priming tasks and one conceptual priming task were used to directly examine component process view's prediction that perceptual priming would be correlated with posterior repetition suppression and conceptual priming would be correlated with frontal repetition suppression. The results showed that both perceptual and conceptual priming involved repetition suppression in both frontal and posterior perceptual regions, at least when measured with our paradigm and tasks, and both frontal and posterior repetition suppression effects were correlated with behavioral priming in all four perceptual and conceptual priming tasks. This finding suggests that both frontal and posterior perceptual regions are involved in perceptual and conceptual priming, and that they are most likely working in concert with one another during priming, as exemplified by an interactive view of priming. Taken together, our data suggest that priming may be supported by several different underlying mechanisms, such as bottom-up processes (component process view of priming), top-down modulation and frontal-posterior interaction/synchrony.

In two experiments the Weighted Salience Model (WSM) of conceptual combination was examined. Several of the hypotheses set forth in the WSM were evaluated, including the importance of salience of constituent features, differential interpretation strategies based on similarity, an initial reliance on the modifier as opposed to the head, and a context effect of salience reorganization. Results confirmed that the hierarchy of output dominance within constituent features was important in determining features in final combinations. Additionally, similar pairs were defined with property interpretations more frequently than were dissimilar pairs, and dissimilar pairs were defined with relation interpretations more frequently than were similar pairs. Context effects were demonstrated through the finding that target features were found more often in primed than unprimed pairs. The hypothesis of modifier superiority was not confirmed. These findings indicate that the WSM adds to the current understanding of conceptual combination through a reliance on output dominance and the importance of context. Despite these strengths, changes to the WSM may be necessary if future studies fail to support the importance of the modifier over the head noun.

Syftet med studien är att studera medierapporteringen avSverigedemokraterna i samband med Järnrörsskandalen med hjälp avgestaltnings- och primingteorin. Materialet bestod av artiklar från Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter och Fria Tider. Materialet analyserades både kvantitativt och kvalitativt. Våra analyser från denna studie visar hur informationsflödet sprids mellan tidningarna och hur de med hjälp av ett gemensamt underlag har konstruerat händelsen. Samtliga tidningar gör sin egen tolkning av Järnrörsskandalen med hjälp av individuella källor och perspektiv. Expressens gestaltning av avslöjandet ifrågasätts aldrig utan godtas i samtliga tidningar som vi tittat på.

A unilingual and a bilingual primed lexical decision task were used to investigate priming effects produced by attended and ignored visual stimuli. In the Chinese language unilingual experiment, accelerated responses to the traditional Chinese character probe targets were observed when the traditional character probe target was the same as the preceding prime target (i.e., attended repetition, AR). However, when a traditional character “matched” a preceding simplified Chinese character prime distractor (i.e., ignored repetition, IR), the expected impaired responses (negative priming) were not observed. In the bilingual experiment (Chinese – English), prime stimuli were in Chinese and probe stimuli were in English. Both AR positive priming and IR negative priming between Chinese – English translation equivalents were produced by bilingual subjects in experiment 2. Further analyses were carried out by dividing subjects into two groups, one less proficient and the other more proficient in English. The contrasting patterns of performance produced by the more and less proficient bilinguals indicate that inhibitory mechanisms can simultaneously operate at two levels of abstraction – global language and local word; and these two types of inhibition can work in a quite independent manner. The contrasting response patterns by the more versus less proficient bilingual subjects also convincingly suggest shared storage for the conceptual representations of a Chinese-English bilingual’s two languages. Moreover, obtaining negative priming in Experiment 2, which uses a large set of 795 words as stimuli, provides strong evidence against the notion that negative priming is contingent on stimulus repetition. Rather, it confirms that processing demand or selection difficulty is critical for producing negative priming.

Zugl.: Saarbrücken, Univ., Diss., 2005 / Download lizenzpflichtig

Thesis (Ph. D. in Psychology)--Vanderbilt University, May 2005. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, June, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-65).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-95).

Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-140). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.