Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the behavioral correlates of the implicit processing of words with pain content by using an affective priming paradigm. Primes were positive and negative words (half of which with pain content) and they preceded targets which were positive and negative words (without pain content). Participants were asked to decide the valence of the target word. Results showed a priming effect for pairs of positive words, confirming what has already been reported in the literature, and a priming effect for pairs of negative words but only when targets were preceded by primes associated with pain content.