Valence does not affect recognition

Abstract

Valence refers to the extent to which a stimulus is viewed as negative or positive. One recent model of valence, the NEVER model (Bowen et al., 2018), predicts that in general negative words will be better remembered than positive or neutral words. However, this prediction is difficult to validate for recognition tests because the literature reports inconsistent findings. Three experiments reexamined whether valence affects recognition of words by taking advantage of the recent increase in the number of high-quality norms and databases, which allow for the construct ion of three sets of stimuli that differ in valence, but are equated on numerous other dimensions known to affect memory. Experiment 1 found no difference in recognition performance between positive and negative words; Experiment 2 found no difference between positive and neutral words; and Experiment 3 found no difference between neutral and negative words. The results disconfirm a prediction of the NEVER model and suggest that previous demonstrations of an effect of valence are due to confounding other dimensions with valence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).