Does your past define you? The role of previous visual experience in subjective reactions to new affective pictures and sounds

According to predictive models of emotion, people use previous experience to construct affective predictions, represented multimodally in the brain. We do not live in a stable world, however. Some environments are uncertain, whereas others are not. In two experiments we investigated how experiencing previous certain versus uncertain contingencies shaped subjective reactions to future affective stimuli, within and across sensory modalities. Two S1-S2 paradigms were used as learning and test phases. S1s were colored circles, S2s negative/neutral affective pictures or sounds. During the learning phase, participants (N = 192, 179) were assigned to the certain (CG) or uncertain group (UG) and presented with 100% (CG) or 50% (UG) S1-S2 congruency between visual stimuli. During the test phase, participants were presented with a new 75% S1-S2 paradigm and visual (Experiment 1) or auditory (Experiment 2) S2s. Participants were asked to rate the expected valence of upcoming S2s (expectancy ratings) or valence and arousal to S2s. In both experiments, the CG reported more extreme expectancy ratings than the UG, suggesting that experiencing previous reliable S1-S2 associations led CG participants to subsequently predict similar associations. No group differences emerged on valence and arousal ratings, which were more prominently influenced by the new 75% contingencies of the test phase rather than by previous learned contingencies. Last, comparing the two experiments, no significant group by experiment interaction was found, supporting the hypothesis of cross-modality generalization at the subjective level. Overall, our results advance knowledge about the mechanisms by which previous learned contingencies shape subjective affective experience