Abstract
Is emotional information co-activated with visual information when generating mental images? An affective priming paradigm was used to experimentally investigate this question. An affective priming effect was observed in a lexical-decision task that was conducted after image generation for the prime noun in a picture-imagery condition, where the participants visualized the prime noun referent, although attention was only directed to the visual aspects of imagery processes. However, the effect was not observed in a letter-imagery condition where the participants visualized the spelling of the prime noun. These findings suggest that the generation of picture images usually involves the activation of both emotional information and visual information, and that the emotional information evoked by picture images is different from that evoked in word recognition.
