Green love is ugly: emotions elicited by synesthetic grapheme-color perceptions.
Synesthetes who experience grapheme-color synesthesia often report feeling uneasy when dealing with incongruently colored graphemes although no empirical data is available to confirm this phenomenon. We studied this affective reaction related to synesthetic perceptions by means of an evaluation task. We found that the perception of an incorrectly colored word affects the judgments of emotional valence. Furthermore, this effect competed with the word's emotional valence in a categorization task thus supporting the automatic nature of this synesthetically elicited affective reaction. When manipulating word valence and word color-photism congruence, we found that responses were slower (and less accurate) for inconsistent conditions than for consistent conditions. Inconsistent conditions were defined as those where semantics and color-photism congruence did not produce a similar assessment and therefore gave rise to a negative affective reaction (i.e., positive-valence words presented in a color different from the synesthete's photism or negative-valence words presented in the photism's color). We therefore observed a modulation of the congruency effect (i.e., faster reaction times to congruently colored words than incongruently colored words). Although this congruence effect has been taken as an index of the true experience of synesthesia, we observed that it can be reversed when the experimental manipulations turn an incongruently colored word into a consistent stimulus. To our knowledge, this is the first report of an affective reaction elicited by the congruency between the synesthetically induced color of a word and the color in which the word is actually presented. The underlying neural mechanisms that might be involved in this phenomenon are discussed.
Callejas
Alicia
A
Departamento de Psicología Experimental, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Granada, Campus Universitario Cartuja s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain. callejas@ugr.es
Acosta
Alberto
A
Lupiáñez
Juan
J
D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger / Q000502:physiology; D001007:Anxiety / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000503:physiopathology; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000503:physiopathology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology