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Short Research Article

Affective Influence on Context-Specific Proportion Congruent (CSPC) Effect

Neutral or Affective Facial Expressions as Context Stimuli

Published Online:February 19, 2019https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000436

Abstract

Abstract. Congruency effects diminish in contexts associated with mostly incongruent trials compared with contexts associated with mostly congruent trials. Here, we aimed to assess affective influences on this context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effect. We presented either neutral or affective faces as context stimuli in a Flanker task and associated mostly incongruent trials with male/female faces for a neutral-context group and with angry/happy faces for a affective-context group. To assess general influences of affective valence, we compared CSPC effects between the neutral-context group and the affective-context group. To assess valence-specific influences, we compared the size of CSPC effects – for the affective-context group only – between participants for whom mostly incongruent trials were associated with angry faces and participants for whom mostly incongruent trials were associated with happy faces. However, the modulating influence on the CSPC effect from affective versus neutral contexts or from valence-proportion mappings was not statistically significant.

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