Oksana Itkes

University of Haifa | haifa · Department of Psychology

Previous research has suggested that cognitive performance is interrupted by negative relative to neutral or positive stimuli. We examined whether negative valence affects performance at the word or phrase level. Participants performed a semantic decision task on word pairs that included either a negative or a positive target word. In Experiment 1,...

We examined the possible dissociation between two modes of valence: affective valence - valence of the emotional response, and semantic valence - stored knowledge about valence of an object or event. In Experiment 1, fifty participants viewed affective pictures that were repeatedly presented while their facial EMG activation and heart rate response...

People sometimes report both pleasant and unpleasant feelings when presented with affective stimuli. However, what is reported as “mixed emotions” might reflect semantic knowledge about the stimulus (Russell, J. A. (2017). Mixed emotions viewed from the psychological constructionist perspective. Emotion Review, 9(2), 111–117). The following researc...

The current article discusses the distinction between affective valence—the degree to which an affective response represents pleasure or displeasure—and semantic valence, the degree to which an object or event is considered positive or negative. To date, measures that reflect positivity and negativity are usually placed under the same conceptual um...

Habituation is perhaps the most pervasive and evolutionary ancient form of learning, defined as attenuation of response following repeated exposure to a stimulus. The ability to habituate to affective information is especially important, as constant activation of a strong emotional response can be maladaptive in most everyday situations. Surprising...

The term valence can refer to either the affective response (e.g., "I feel bad") or the semantic knowledge about a stimulus (e.g., "car accidents are bad"). Accordingly, the content of self-reports can be more "experience-near" and proxy to the mental state of affective feelings, or, alternatively, involve nonexperiential semantic knowledge. In thi...

Skilled reading is often considered an automatic and effortless task. Even when reading is task irrelevant, semantic content influences performance. For instance, in an emotional Stroop task, participants have slower color RTs for emotional relative to neutral words. Visual degradation, such as word inversion, is known to impair skilled (automatic)...

Recent theories of metaphor comprehension discuss the cognitive substrates involved in processing metaphors. However, the role of valence perception during metaphor comprehension has received little attention. The present study aims to examine the effect of emotional valence on metaphor processing, as well as the interaction between this effect and...