#visual valence

Visual Valency Studies. Also. 5th. 6th.

Aka: Fiction Affects Reality

Excerpts:

Imagine walking through an art gallery or taking a stroll in nature. You see a colorful painting or a serene landscape, and almost instantly, you feel something—maybe good or bad. This dimension of feeling from negative to positive, known as valence, is a fundamental way our brain processes the world. In our latest study, we explore an intriguing question: Can our visual system directly decode feelings from the environment without needing our higher cognitive processes to analyze and interpret objects or scenes, to tell us how to feel?

This suggests our brain might have a more fundamental and objective way of perceiving emotion—through simple visual cues.

This discovery suggests that part of our feeling of valence isn’t tied to recognizing specific things but rather to visual patterns, regardless of whether the image shows something real or imaginary.

On the other hand, the emotions tied to interpreting objects or concepts (like recognizing a friendly dog or human face) engage higher-level brain areas. This division implies that our brains have a built-in system to process visual valence separately from more complex, thought or content driven emotional responses.

This proves that our visual system itself contains emotional information that can generate or “imagine” new ways to make us feel.

Our study contributes to the growing understanding that perception involves more than just recognizing objects or recalling memories; it also includes sensing fundamental qualities in our environment that carry emotional weight. While emotional responses have long been embedded in perception for senses like smell and touch, which we call the proximal or close sense, we now understand and extend this concept to vision, a distal sense.

The brain dedicates significant resources to visual perception—not just for identifying objects, but also for encoding emotional aspects. Just as texture reveals whether something is rough or smooth, visual valence tells us if something feels positive or negative. By decoding these basic visual elements, our findings reveal how deeply our emotions are intertwined with the fabric of visual perception itself.

2nd

Subjective feelings are thought to be supported by the representation of internal interoceptive bodily states which construct emotions when integrated with the higher-order conceptual meaning of external cues and retrieved memories. However, the term affect… more broadly reflects the basic feeling ingredient underlying all sensations. Affect, as originally conceptualized by Wundt, is a fundamental component of all experience, extracted as if a feature from the external world…. this is thought to be mediated by an evoked aversion or fondness at a deeper level of abstraction, intermixing with afferent bodily states to affect us.

These investigations would shed light on the notion of subjective affect as directly embedded in visual experience, with core affect as an emergent property.

This study goes further than a correlation between visual features and affect by demonstrating the direct causal role of visual affect and its potential unique signatures in the brain and behavior…. [Brain recognize positive and negative images.]

Interoceptive modalities, including those that derive their stimulation from the proximal external senses, such as pain or caress, sweet and bitter taste and maybe even fruity or rancid smells, have sensory receptors that are evolutionarily tuned to information broadly consistent with valence. By contrast, in the exteroceptive senses, such as vision, there are no receptors for valence. They require discovering predictors of valence from the process of perception if such associations exist in the environment. This ecological perspective aligns with the Bayesian understanding of brain function, where observers learn the transitional probabilities from seeing to feeling.

Affect can arise from different levels of abstraction, ranging from conceptual processes rooted in identifying concrete objects and their relationships within scenes to experiences more closely tied to abstract lower-level visual patterns. Combination of feedforward and recurrent feedback loops that integrate both concrete and abstract visual processing shape a complex decentralized network from which affect emerges. This distributed perspective aligns with theories on aesthetic appreciation of artworks, or visual appeal of nature

3rd. Lexical decisions are figure out if word or not word.

Recognizing written or spoken words involves a sequence of processing stages, transforming sensory features into lexical-semantic representations…. Here, we examined whether the effects of valence on word recognition are specific to the visual modality or are common across visual and auditory modalities…. We found that valence differentially influenced visual and auditory word recognition. Valence had an asymmetric effect on visual lexical decision times, primarily speeding up recognition of positive words…. We interpret these findings as indicating that valence influences word recognition partly at the sensory-perceptual stage. We relate these effects to the effects of positive (reward) and negative (punishment) reinforcers on perception.

The capacity to recognize written and spoken words is an essential human cognitive skill. One effective way to uncover the cognitive processes of word recognition is to examine the time it takes to distinguish words from non-words.

If valence differentially affects visual and auditory lexical decision times, this would provide evidence for an influence of valence on sensory-perceptual components of word processing, considering that higher-level processing stages are shared between visual and auditory word recognition

All three analyses revealed that valence differentially affects visual and auditory word recognition. The effect of valence on visual word recognition was asymmetric, in which positive valence facilitated word recognition. By contrast, the effect of valence on auditory word recognition was symmetric, with both positive and negative valence facilitating word recognition relative to neutral words.

[Just like images. Text and auditory words create emotional affect.]

Results from Analysis 1 showed a differential effect of valence on visual and auditory word recognition, in which the relation between valence and visual lexical decision time followed a linear function while the relation between valence and auditory lexical decision time followed an inverted-U function. By analyzing a common set of words across visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, this finding indicates that the emotional modulation of word recognition is modality-specific, thus implicating sensory-perceptual processing stages.

The effect of valence on word recognition may be a specific instantiation of the effect of reinforcers on sensory processing (Anderson, 2019), with emotions being closely related to rewards and punishments (Rolls, 1990). Specifically, previous work has shown that visual stimuli (e.g., objects) that become associated with positive outcome (e.g., monetary gain) are more rapidly recognized (Anderson et al., 2011; Becker et al., 2020; Hickey et al., 2015) and are more strongly represented in visual cortex than neutral stimuli (Hickey & Peelen, 2015, 2017; Serences & Saproo, 2010). Similarly, the positive meaning of a word (e.g. “money”) may act as a positive reinforcer, facilitating the sensory processing of the word…. There is some evidence that positive reinforcement similarly facilitates auditory processing (Anderson, 2016; Asutay & Västfjäll, 2016), in line with our results of similar effects of positive valence on visual and auditory word recognition.

Intriguingly, we found that negative association facilitated word recognition in the auditory modality, with faster responses to negative words. This is in line with the rapid processing of disgust vocalizations (Sauter & Eimer, 2010). However, we are not aware of studies experimentally associating auditory stimuli with negative outcome (e.g., monetary loss). The current results suggest that the processing of such stimuli may be facilitated in the auditory domain, a prediction that can be tested in future work.

Another inherent difference between auditory and visual word recognition is that auditory information unfolds across time while visual information is instantly available. It is possible, therefore, that the differential effect of valence on auditory and visual word recognition revealed here is due to this temporal difference.

4th

From the gratification experienced while reading a poem to the aggression expressed with an insult, words are fundamental means to elicit and express emotions.

Similarly, Cacioppo (2004) used the term positivity offset to describe that the approach system is typically activated in situations of low arousal, providing the basis for exploration and curiosity. At a high level of arousal, instead, a negative bias is assumed, as the withdrawal system responds strongly at high levels of arousal. [Is that why I need to put it down or walk away when something exciting is happening in a story?]

Previous evidence has shown that emotion-laden words can modulate cortical responses at all stages…. This enhanced EPN for emotion-laden words reflects improved visual processing in the visual cortices and allocation of attention to the emotional content of the stimuli due to their higher motivational significance.

Overall, they indicate that negative images are preferentially processed at high and medium levels of arousal, demonstrated in the larger amplitudes of ERP components for these conditions at early and later stages of processing, and congruent with the idea of a negative bias.

In sum, despite recent efforts to separate the contributions of arousal and valence to the emotional modulation of ERPs, results still appear rather inconsistent.

5th

In conclusion, our results show that emotions play an important role and improve the processing of information.

The past 20 years have seen growing research interest in the link between emotions and cognition (for a review see Kaakinen et al., 2018). Studies have shown that emotions are involved in judgment and decision-making, and should therefore be regarded as an integral part of cognitive functions.

According to LeNy (1979), each text possesses a semantic relief that is determined both by the importance of the information and its emotional charge. These two components can also be dissociated, as it is possible to have important information that is weakly affective, and information of little importance that is strongly affective. In their model of text comprehension, Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) postulated that emotions can guide readers in their creation of a coherent representation of the situation described by the text. Emotional feelings drive readers’ attention and help them to decide which information needs to be activated and which information is relevant to the situation. According to Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), emotions therefore constitute an active control structure…. This makes the text’s structure easier to memorize, with readers remembering not only the emotions induced by the text, but also the object of these emotions.

Thus, the results of this study indicate that involving emotions while reading has a beneficial influence on students’ understanding of short literary texts.

Researchers generally agree that emotional valence also plays a role in comprehension…. The presence of emotional information seemed to increase the processing speed, compared with neutral information, and serve as a cue for information retrieval. Readers seem quite sensitive to this type of information.

Emotional valence is therefore not the only factor that needs to be taken into account. Emotional intensity also influences text comprehension, even if there has been little research on this aspect….

In sum, our results show that valence and emotional intensity play an important role in text comprehension and memorization. They corroborate previous results showing that since emotional stimuli are emotivational, they are more likely to be attended to than neutral stimuli, and undergo better processing than neutral stimuli (Lang et al., 1997). We can interpret this influence as indicating that the valence and emotional intensity of texts could constitute specific cues that are present during encoding and may contribute to deeper processing of the information (Tulving, 2002), thus facilitating subsequent recall.

[Emotions] play an important role and improve the processing of information.

6th

In an era of emotionally saturated digital media and information overload, effective communication demands more than clarity and accuracy—it requires emotional awareness…. Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, communication, and design, we show that emotional responses significantly influence how information is perceived, retained, and shared.

In an age of information overload and emotionally saturated digital media, effective communication requires more than factual accuracy—it requires emotional awareness. Emotions play a central role in how individuals perceive, process, and respond to information. They guide attention, shape memory, influence judgment, and drive behaviors such as sharing and engagement, making them fundamental to the dynamics of communication.

Central to this review is the principle that information design inherently modulates emotional responses. Multimodal content (text, visuals, audio, interaction) actively shapes valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD), directly influencing information processing and behavioral outcomes. As AI-generated content, social media, and immersive technologies become pervasive, emotion-aware design emerges as both a transformative tool and an urgent ethical imperative. When ethically deployed, it fosters empathy, trust, and engagement; when unconstrained, it risks amplifying misinformation, polarization, and psychological burden.

This review examined how emotional dimensions—valence, arousal, and dominance—differentially influence the three key stages of information processing: comprehension, memory, and behavior. Positive emotions generally broaden attention, support memory retention, and promote sharing, while negative emotions enhance analytic thinking and detail recall but may increase bias or reduce sharing, depending on context. High arousal boosts memory consolidation and sharing but risks spreading misinformation; low arousal supports reflective learning and may reduce engagement. High dominance fosters active participation, whereas low dominance leads to social withdrawal.

Although text, visuals, audio, and interaction operate through different modalities, they all serve to regulate emotion in ways that enhance perception, comprehension, and memory…. text design evokes emotional depth through narrative structure and content; visual design guides attention and mood using color, shape, layout, and imagery; audio design influences affective states through tone, sound effects, and music; and interaction design fosters a sense of control and engagement through interaction methods, motion effects, and navigational cues.

Emotional regulation in communication is not just about managing affect—it also shapes user behavior and enhances message effectiveness…. Ultimately, the alignment of emotional activation with higher-order cognitive processes enhances both the depth of emotional resonance and the efficacy of information transfer.

I’ve been working on this all day.