Several studies have demonstrated that affective states influence the number of associations formed between remotely related concepts. Someone in a neutral or negative affective state might draw the association between cold and hot, whereas someone in a positive affective state might spontaneously form the more distant association between cold and sneeze. Could the reverse be true, that generat...

This article discusses the social representations of women living in common-law marriage in terms of their vulnerability to becoming infected with HIV/AIDS. Data were obtained through the free association of words, and consisted of an excerpt of a study founded on the Social Representations Theory developed with HIV-negative women living in the state capital and cities in the interior of Bahia....

In two studies, we examined whether (a) conceptions of Jesus would differ between Koreans and Americans, and whether (b) national differences in self-reported personality and well-being are mediated by the cultural norm for personality and well-being. Because there is only one Jesus, different conceptions held by Koreans and Americans are likely to reflect cultural construction processes. In St...

The experiments reported here were designed to explore the bizarreness effect in implicit and explicit memory by using simple line drawings of common objects (normal vs. bizarre). Each drawing was presented alone under mixed-list encoding conditions. Results showed that performance on explicit conceptual memory tests (cued recall in Experiments 1 and 2) was higher when material was studied in a...

The objective of this study was to learn about the central nucleus of the social representations of caring and treating for patients and nurses. This qualitative study was founded on the theoretical-methodological framework of the structural approach of social representations. Participants were 90 subjects, who answered a questionnaire using the free association technique. Data analysis was per...

According to Mednick's (1962) theory of individual differences in creativity, creative individuals appear to have a richer and more flexible associative network than less creative individuals. Thus, creative individuals are characterized by "flat" (broader associations) instead of "steep" (few, common associations) associational hierarchies. To study these differences, we implement a novel comp...

This study explores the impact of the extensive use of an oral device since infancy (pacifier) on the acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotional concepts. While recent evidence showed a negative relation between pacifier use and children's emotional competence (Niedenthal et al., 2012), the possible interaction between use of pacifier and processing of emotional and abstract language has ...

Words known to have strong associates of a particular relational type were embedded in lists of other words with relations of the same type or in lists of words with relations of a different type (e.g.close-far in a list of other opposite pairs or in a list of synonym pairs). In free association, the probability of a response consistent with the relational context was higher than the probabilit...

In this article, we describe the most extensive set of word associations collected to date. The database contains over 12,000 cue words for which more than 70,000 participants generated three responses in a multiple-response free association task. The goal of this study was (1) to create a semantic network that covers a large part of the human lexicon, (2) to investigate the implications of a m...