Emotional Priming Altered Perception

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Have you ever wondered why sometimes when you touch someone it’s electric and other times it is just, well, touching someone? Past research shows that the chemical senses do typically have altered perception when different emotional states are induced by video (Chen & Dalton 2005) (Platte, Herbet et al. 2013). Additionally our expectations in other senses such as hearing have been found to be affected by emotional priming (Timmers & Crook 2014). This paper expands on this idea by proposing a study that uses video clips to induce emotions and tests if these emotional states have an effect on haptic perception thresholds. The emotions being investigated are anger, disgust, fear, sadness, amusement, and love. It will also account for the fact …show more content…

A study by Renee Timmers and Harriet Crook (2014) tested the hypothesis that emotional priming altered the expectations of subjects in music. They did this by having subjects look at happy, sad, and neutral pictures then listen to neutral melodies and determine what they expected different aspects of the continuation of the melody to be. They also had an additional experiment where subjects rated the quality of the different melodic continuations. Analyzing this data together they found that the effect of emotion on expectation of melodies was only significant when rating the quality of the tune (as was done in their additional experiment). It was also significant when the subjects were expecting wide intervals (Timmers & Crook 2014). Although this experiment does not relate directly to how affective states can alter perceptions it does give insight into how affective states change our expectations which play a major role in our perceptions. This, in hand with the results of the proposed study, could be used to investigate the constructs that play into our perceptions and their inner …show more content…

A significant amount of research exists testing the efficacy of certain clips in inducing certain emotions. Hewig et al. (2005) have found a set of clips that can effectively induce feelings of anger, disgust, fear, sadness and amusement. This was done by having 38 participants view 16 different clips thought to induce different emotions and then having them take a 21 emotion range inventory scale. The results indicated that a handful of these clips did in fact induce anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and amusement. (Hewig et al. 2005) In the proposed experiment one of each of the clips that induce these different emotions will be used in addition to a romantic

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