The good, the bad, and the red: implicit color-valence associations across cultures.

Cultural differences-as well as similarities-have been found in explicit color-emotion associations between Chinese and Western populations. However, implicit associations in a cross-cultural context remain an understudied topic, despite their sensitivity to more implicit knowledge. Moreover, they can be used to study color systems-that is, emotional associations with one color in the context of an opposed one. Therefore, we tested the influence of two different color oppositions on affective stimulus categorization: red versus green and red versus white, in two experiments. In Experiment 1, stimuli comprised positive and negative words, and participants from the West (Austria/Germany), and the East (Mainland China, Macau) were tested in their native languages. The Western group showed a significantly stronger color-valence interaction effect than the Mainland Chinese (but not the Macanese) group for red-green but not for red-white opposition. To explore color-valence interaction effects independently of word stimulus differences between participant groups, we used affective silhouettes instead of words in Experiment 2. Again, the Western group showed a significantly stronger color-valence interaction than the Chinese group in red-green opposition, while effects in red-white opposition did not differ between cultural groups. Our findings complement those from explicit association research in an unexpected manner, where explicit measures showed similarities between cultures (associations for red and green), our results revealed differences and where explicit measures showed differences (associations with white), our results showed similarities, underlining the value of applying comprehensive measures in cross-cultural research on cross-modal associations.

Are self-caused distractors easier to ignore? Experiments with the flanker task.

Four experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between action-outcome learning and the ability to ignore distractors. Each participant performed 600 acquisition trials, followed by 200 test trials. In the acquisition phase, participants were presented with a fixed action-outcome contingency (e.g., Key #1 ➔ green distractors), while that contingency was reversed in the test phase. In Experiments 1-3, a distractor feature depended on the participants' action. In Experiment 1, actions determined the color of the distractors; in Experiment 2, they determined the target-distractor distance; in Experiment 3, they determined target-distractor compatibility. Results suggest that with the relatively simple features (color and distance), exposure to action-outcome contingencies changed distractor cost, whereas with the complex or relational feature (target-distractor compatibility), exposure to the contingencies did not affect distractor cost. In Experiment 4, the same pattern of results was found (effect of contingency learning on distractor cost) with perceptual sequence learning, using visual cues ("X" vs. "O") instead of actions. Thus, although the mechanism of associative learning may not be unique to actions, such learning plays a role in the allocation of attention to task-irrelevant events.