Rule violations have usually been studied from a third-person perspective, identifying situational factors that render violations more or less likely. A first-person perspective of the agent that actively violates the rules, on the other hand, is only just beginning to emerge. Here we show that committing a rule violation sensitises towards subsequent negative stimuli as well as subsequent authority-related stimuli. In a Prime-Probe design, we used an instructed rule-violation task as the Prime and a word categorisation task as the Probe. (...) Also, we employed a control condition that used a rule inversion task as the Prime. Probe targets were categorised faster after a violation relative to after a rule-based response if they related to either, negative valence or authority. Inversions, however, primed only negative stimuli and did not accelerate the categorisation of authority-related stimuli. A heightened sensitivity towards authority-related targets thus seems to be specific to rule violations. A control experiment showed that these effects cannot be explained in terms of semantic priming. Therefore, we propose that rule violations necessarily activate authority-related representations that make rule violations qualitatively different from simple rule inversions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople hiss and swear when they make errors, frown and swear again when they encounter conflicting information. Such error- and conflict-related signs of negative affect are found even when there is no time pressure or external reward and the task itself is very simple. Previous studies, however, provide inconsistent evidence regarding the affective consequences of resolved conflicts, that is, conflicts that resulted in correct responses. We tested whether response accuracy in the Eriksen flanker task will moderate the effect of trial (...) incongruence using affective priming to measure positive and negative affect. We found that responses to incongruent trials elicit positive affect irrespective of their accuracy. Errors, in turn, result in negative affect irrespective of trial congruence. The effects of conflicts and errors do not interact and affect different dimensions of affective priming. Conflicts change the speed of evaluative categorisation while errors are reflected in categorisation accuracy... (shrink)