The Affective Meaning of Words is Constrained by the Conceptual Meaning

To directly investigate the reciprocal causal relationship of the conceptual and affective meaning of words, two priming experiments were conducted with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the influence of semantic relatedness on the affective priming effect was explored by manipulating the semantic associative strength between the prime and target words (i.e., high vs. low) while keeping the affective association between them constant...