The effect of an auditory subliminal message upon the performance of a writing task and upon the mood of the participants was investigated in this study. One hundred and twenty-eight subjects (randomly assigned to eight conditions, each one comprising 16 subjects) were asked to create a children's story. One condition was exposed to a happy subliminal message (the word happy repeated every five seconds, 14 dB below ambient noise), one condition to a sad subliminal message, and another condition to a subliminal white noise tape. These three conditions received the message while writing the story. Three additional conditions (incubation) were exposed to the same tapes for twenty minutes before writing the story. In addition, there were two contrast conditions in which subjects were requested to write a happy (sad) children's story without being exposed to a subliminal message. The main dependent measures were: self-ratings of the subjects' mood on the axis of pleasure; judges' ratings of the happiness/sadness of the stories; and happy, sad, happy-related, sad-related, and total word counts. With regards to the task, the results indicated no effects for the no incubation conditions; a significant difference between the happy and sad conditions among the incubation conditions; and a significant difference between the two upon request conditions. With regards to the mood of the participants, there was a decrease in pleasure for the sad no incubation condition and a similar decrease for the happy incubation condition. The main conclusions drawn from the present experiment are: mood and task are affected in an independent fashion by the subliminal messages; the affective tone of the stories did not in turn affect the mood of the subjects in the subliminal conditions; the request to write a happy or a sad story did not give rise to mood change as observed with other supraliminal mood-induction techniques; and it appears that subliminal effects are different from supraliminal effects.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/5651 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Mibashan, David. |
| Contributors | Swingle, P. G., |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 157 p. |
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