The effect of word valence presented in the first study and the effect of attention
presented in the second study support findings of previous research. Word valence in the
first study did not have any effect on the accuracy but did affect the bias with users being
more liberal with choosing old words when the word valence was pleasant or unpleasant.
These results show that word valence did not affect the more detail-oriented task but it
did cause people to be more creative and open-minded. Kousta, Vinson, and Vigliocco
(2009) suggest that emotion-evoking stimuli can lead to rapid modification of behavior to
match the context. The pleasant and unpleasant words may influence the participant’s
bias to the more liberal side because the participant is more open-minded to the
possibilities in the context and make more relations from the current word to other past
situations so are then more likely to say a word is old. To test this, another study would
have to be conducted to see if the pleasant and unpleasant words cause participants to
free-associate more than the neutral words and to recall more past events relating to that
word.