P2-25: Love Priming and Perception Bias

Abstract

On the basis of previous research (Gasper & Clore, 2002 Psychological Science 14 34–40) showing that positive emotion like love facilitates global perception, two experiments were carried out to answer whether the love priming always has a positive impact on global processing, and whether global versus local perception varies with the self-regulatory focus associated with love styles. In Experiment 1, participants were primed by either imagining a walk with a person they were in love with (love priming condition) or a walk alone (control condition). Then, they were shown large letters made of small letters and decided if either of two specific letters appeared on the screen. Compared to this, in Experiment 2, love was primed subliminally with the name of the loved person, and the participants had to do the letter task as in the previous experiment. In addition, they had to fill out the love style scales and they were divided into two groups (passionate love and companionate love). Experiment 1 showed that the love priming condition reduced the reaction time for the global perception much more than the control condition. However, love priming in Experiment 2 facilitated global perception just in the group of companionate love. In the group of passionate love, the reaction time for local perception decreased after the love priming trials. The results implicated that various love styles could be differentiated regarding to different goals which might have an impact on the self-regulatory focus in perception.