Spring Break or Heart Break? Extending Valence Bias to Emotional Words

Authors

Nicholas R. Harp, University of Nebraska–LincolnFollow
Catherine C. Brown, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Maital Neta, University of Nebraska–LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2021

Citation

Published in final edited form as: Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2021 September 1; 12(7): 1392–1401. doi:10.1177/1948550620972296.

Comments

Author manuscript Soc Psychol Personal Sci. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2021 October 28.

Abstract

Ambiguous stimuli are useful for assessing emotional bias. For example, surprised faces could convey a positive or negative meaning, and the degree to which an individual interprets these expressions as positive or negative represents their “valence bias.” Currently, the most well- wellvalidated ambiguous stimuli for assessing valence bias include nonverbal signals (faces and scenes), overlooking an inherent ambiguity in verbal signals. This study identified 32 words with dual-valence ambiguity (i.e., relatively high intersubject variability in valence ratings and relatively slow response times) and length-matched clearly valenced words (16 positive, 16 negative). Preregistered analyses demonstrated that the words-based valence bias correlated with the bias for faces, r_s(213) = .27, p < .001, and scenes, r_s(204) = .46, p < .001. That is, the same people who interpret ambiguous faces/scenes as positive also interpret ambiguous words as positive. These findings provide a novel tool for measuring valence bias and greater generalizability, resulting in a more robust measure of this bias.