The purpose of this study was to search for the factors that contributed to the understanding of the emotions expressed by figurative language. In the preliminary study, 74 similes that express joy, sadness, and anger were selected. Eighty-four subjects rated 74 similes on SD scales. Factor analysis was conducted on the data. Throughout the factor analysis, two factors emerged. These two factors were interpreted as "activity" factor and "evaluation" factor. The distributions of similes in the three emotions were relatively different in the two-dimensional factorial space, namely the affective meaning space. Throughout the discriminant analysis, "activity" and "evaluation" factors contributed to the understanding of the emotions expressed by the similes.These findings indicated that understanding of the emotions expressed by the similes was based on those two foctors.

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Two tests examined whether mood congruent memory bias is found in the daily recall of personal past event. Subjects described their memories about past events unexpectedly recalled, and then completed the questionnaire to assess affective value of their past events and to assess their mood states both at the time recalled their past events and at the time tested. When affective value of past event was evaluated by desirability, mood effect was not found (Test 1). While, when past event was evaluated by the same measure as mood rating, subjects who were in the positive mood recalled more positively past events than those in the negative mood (Test 2). The difference between the results of two tests was discussed with respect to the variety of affective value rating for memory and mood reparative effect. In addition, these results suggest that mood has an influence on unexpected memory process as daily recall.

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Four experiments were conducted to examine the subliminal affective priming effects on the Murphy & Zajonc's (1993) paradigm. In Experiment 1, 34 Ss were assigned to either the suboptimal or the optimal exposure conditions similar to the previous study. The strong priming effect that influences Ss' evaluation of target stimuli by prime valence was found under the optimal exposure condition but not under the suboptimal exposure condition. In Experiment 2, 45 subjects participated in testing whether their awareness of primes was a determinant of the priming effect as shown in Experiment 1. The results suggested that consciousness of primes plays a critical role in the occurrence of the priming effect. In Experiment 3 (51 subjects) and Experiment 4 (60 subjects), we focused our attention to the suboptimal exposure condition. Such factors as target characteristics, inter-trial intervals, visual angles of primes and replicated presentations of the same targets across the prime conditions were controlled because of their possible effects on priming. Neither of the two experiments revealed any significant priming effects under the suboptimal condition. These results pose a question about the generality of the phenomena that the previous research reported.

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