THE EFFECT OF AFFECTIVE PRIMING THROUGH DYNAMIC STIMULI ON RECOGNIZING EMOTIONS

Emotions are important for everyday communication and it is very useful to recognize them accurately as well as to regulate them. Researching how certain emotional states can be evoked has significant practical implications for everyday life, but also for the work of professionals. Studies of affective priming provide a useful methodological framework for investigating this issue. The aim of this study is to explore affective priming with dynamic stimuli (video material), and the contribution of the age and gender variables to this process. The study involved a total of 307 students from the University of Banja Luka, consisting of 236 female and 71 male participants aged between 19-25 years (M=22.6, SD=1.4). The research was conducted online with special software created for this purpose. Three factors were varied: congruence of prime and target (congruent, incongruent and absence of prime), gender (male and female) and age (late adolescence and early adulthood). The photos from KDEF (Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces) base were used for the assessment of the emotional facial expressions, and two short video cuts from the Filmsammlung Johannes Hewig´s collection called “A revised film set for the induction of basic emotions” were shown as primes. The effect of affective priming was analyzed separately for two emotions - happiness and sadness as targets. The results show a priming effect on recognition of happiness in relation to age. Incongruency between prime and target leads to the inhibition of happiness recognition for younger students. Affective priming was not found in experimental situations where emotion of sadness was targeted.