The impact of minimal exposure to affective information on mood and its moderation by prime visibility: a meta-analysis

This article presents a meta-analysis of the impact of minimal exposure to affective stimuli on the emergence of enduring conscious affective feelings. Theories often assume that such affective feelings are linked to automatic appraisals of events (i.e. in the absence of an evaluative processing goal). However, few studies have tested this hypothesis. Moreover, they have provided divergent results. We propose a meta-analysis of these studies to get a clearer picture on this issue. The meta-analysis includes 22 studies (37 effect sizes; combined N = 2159) in which participants were repeatedly exposed to affective stimuli in the absence of an evaluative processing goal before their mood was measured. In this analysis, we focused on the type of stimulus presentation (i.e. visible vs. masked) as well as on the type of stimulus (i.e. faces, pictures, words). The results indicate that the effect of a stimulus is moderated by the visibility of the stimuli. Repeated exposure to visible stimuli leads to congruency effects (i.e. positive stimuli lead to positive feelings), whereas exposure to masked stimuli leads to contrast effects (i.e. positive stimuli lead to negative feelings). Moreover, these effects seem to be restricted to some types of stimuli, with no detectable effects of emotional faces.