Effects of positive, negative, and neutral moods on associative and semantic priming

Using a priming paradigm, the two experiments described here test the influence of positive and negative induced moods, in comparison with a control group, on the activation between primes and targets that are associatively and semantically related. There is a controversy surrounding the existence of an automatic semantic priming, which is a kind of conflicting locus between the modularist and connectionist theories of knowledge organisation. The main result is that, as expected from certain activation theories of affect, a positive mood facilitated the automatic priming of primes and targets that are semantically related. This result is interpreted on the basis of a larger spread of activation leading to a more complex and richer cognitive organisation of concepts.