15. January 2021 : New publication on mood primed perception of our world

Czeszumski A, Albers F, Walter S and König P (2020)
Let me make you happy, and I’ll tell you how you look around: Using an approach-avoidance task as an embodied mood prime in a free-viewing task
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.09.289249 bioRxiv

Although emotional priming has been an important topic in research on top-down influences in overt attention, in particular regarding external and internal affective influences, there is little research using embodied primes.

In our eye-tracking study, we attempted to broaden previous research by investigating the interaction of emotions and visual exploration. In a joystick-based approach-avoidance task, the participants’ mood was primed by a series of either positively or negatively valenced visual stimuli. Subsequently, the participants had to explore web pages containing both positively and negatively valenced content. The results showed an increased attention to and exploration of web pages’ image content after the participants performed bodily congruent actions in the priming phase. So, the suggestion is that prior congruent movements, in line with our bodily reactions (approach positive and avoid negative), may influence how we observe and scrutinize images presented on the World Wide Web.