Abstract
Cognitive conflict arises when distractors provide information incongruent with a task-relevant target. Ignoring these distractors is effortful, reflected in slower reaction times. The literature shows both positive and negative affective outcomes of expending effort. Short-term priming studies show negative valence for viewing incongruent stimuli and conflict identification (response to both target and distractor) but positive valence for conflict resolution (responding and successfully ignoring the distractor). However, long-term association studies show that stimuli used in high-effort conflict resolution and conflict detection conditions are later recognized as positive faster than negative, indicating that they acquire positive valence. The present study explores whether this retrospective positive evaluation of effortful stimuli emerges when the association is based on passive viewing of incongruency rather than response to it. During the association phase of the present experiment, participants identified the age of emotionless gender Stroop stimuli, where faces were superimposed with congruent or incongruent gender words. Some actors mostly appeared in incongruent trials while others usually appeared in a congruent trial. In the transfer phase, they identified the emotion that actors displayed. Preliminary results show that the actors associated with frequent incongruency were not more quickly identified as positive than negative. Expanding on the previous research showing high-effort stimuli in conflict resolution and detection tasks later induce positive valence, passive viewing of conflict is insufficient to produce the same effect.