scholarly journals The Mirror Effect: A Preregistered Replication

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Monéger ◽  
Armand Chatard ◽  
Leila Selimbegović

When individuals are exposed to their own image in a mirror, known to increase self-awareness, they may show increased accessibility of suicide-related words (a phenomenon labeled “the mirror effect”; Selimbegović & Chatard, 2013). We attempted to replicate this effect in a pre-registered study (N = 150). As in the original study, self-awareness was manipulated using a mirror and recognition latencies for accurately detecting suicide-related words, negative words, and neutral words in a lexical decision task were assessed. We found no evidence of the mirror effect in pre-registered analyses. A multiverse analysis revealed a significant mirror effect only when excluding extreme observations. An equivalence TOST test did not yield evidence for or against the mirror effect. Overall, the results suggest that the original effect was a false positive or that the conditions for obtaining it (in terms of statistical power and/or outlier detection method) are not yet fully understood. Implications for the mirror effect and recommendations for pre-registered replications are discussed.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Monéger ◽  
Armand Chatard ◽  
Leila Selimbegovic

Self-focused attention has been shown to induce negative thoughts and affects. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that individual differences in proneness to shame and guilt moderate the effects of self-awareness priming on failure- and escape-thought accessibility. Using a priming procedure known to increase self-awareness, participants (N = 150) were briefly primed with their first names (33ms) before completing a lexical decision task with words related to success, failure or escape. As expected, first name priming facilitated identification of failure- and escape-related words, especially among individuals prone to self-conscious emotions. The present study suggests that self-awareness is aversive, especially among individuals prone to guilt and shame.


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Maire ◽  
Renaud Brochard ◽  
Jean-Luc Kop ◽  
Vivien Dioux ◽  
Daniel Zagar

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.


Author(s):  
Xu Xu ◽  
Chunyan Kang ◽  
Kaia Sword ◽  
Taomei Guo

Abstract. The ability to identify and communicate emotions is essential to psychological well-being. Yet research focusing exclusively on emotion concepts has been limited. This study examined nouns that represent emotions (e.g., pleasure, guilt) in comparison to nouns that represent abstract (e.g., wisdom, failure) and concrete entities (e.g., flower, coffin). Twenty-five healthy participants completed a lexical decision task. Event-related potential (ERP) data showed that emotion nouns elicited less pronounced N400 than both abstract and concrete nouns. Further, N400 amplitude differences between emotion and concrete nouns were evident in both hemispheres, whereas the differences between emotion and abstract nouns had a left-lateralized distribution. These findings suggest representational distinctions, possibly in both verbal and imagery systems, between emotion concepts versus other concepts, implications of which for theories of affect representations and for research on affect disorders merit further investigation.


1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Pexman ◽  
C. I. Racicot ◽  
Stephen J. Lupker

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Palma ◽  
Marie-France Marin ◽  
k onishi ◽  
Debra Titone

Although several studies have focused on novel word learning and consolidation in native (presumably monolingual) speakers, less is know about how bilinguals add novel words to their mental lexicon. Here, we trained 33 English-French bilinguals on novel word-forms that were neighbors to “hermit” English words (i.e., words with no existing neighbors). Importantly, these English words varied in terms of orthographic overlap with their French translation equivalent (i.e., cognates vs. noncognates). We measured explicit recognition of the novel neighbors and the interaction between novel neighbors and English words through a lexical decision task, both before and after a sleep interval. In the lexical decision task, we found evidence of immediate facilitation for English words with novel neighbors, and evidence of competition after a sleep interval for cognate words only. These results suggest that higher quality of existing lexical representations predicts an earlier onset for novel word lexicalization.


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