Odours as affective-processing context for word evaluation: A case of cross-modal affective priming

In a recent series of priming studies (e.g. Hermans, De Houwer, & Eelen, 1994), it has been demonstrated that response latencies to affectively valenced target stimuli are mediated by the affective relation between the valence of the target and the valence of the priming stimulus that immediately precedes the target. If prime and target share the same valence (e.g. positive-positive), response latencies are facilitated as compared to trials for which prime and target are of opposite valence (e.g. negative-positive). This line of research provides strong support for the assumption that humans continuously evaluate external stimuli in an automatic fashion, which is one of the central premises in a number of recent cognitive-representational models of emotion. Whereas in previous affective priming studies only visual stimuli (words, simple line drawings, pictures) have been used as primes and targets, in the present experiment, positive and negative odours were used as primes, and words as targets. Results showed that target words were evaluated faster if preceded by a similarly valenced odour, as compared to affectively incongruent odour-word pairs. This effect was restricted to the female subjects, a fact which is attributed to general gender differences in odour perception.