European Journal of Social Psychology

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)

Published online 23 June 2009 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.656

Short research note

How love and sex can influence recognition of faces and words:
A processing model account

JENS FÖRSTER*
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract

A link between romantic love and face recognition and sexual desire and verbal recognition is suggested. When in love,
people typically focus on a long-term perspective which enhances global perception, whereas when experiencing sexual
encounters they focus on the present which enhances a perception of details. Because people automatically activate these
processing styles when in love or sex, subtle reminders of love versus sex should suffice to change ways of perception.
Global processing should further enhance face recognition, whereas local processing should enhance recognition of
verbal information. In two studies participants were primed with concepts and thoughts of love versus sex. Compared to
control groups, recognition of verbal material was enhanced after sex priming, whereas face recognition was enhanced
after love priming. In Experiment 2 it was demonstrated that differences in global versus local perception mediated these
effects. However, there was no indication for mood as a mediator. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The question whether love and sex are different or basically the same has always been a matter of debate. Most influential
for Western philosophy perhaps was Plato’s symposium, which outlines the intricate levels of interpersonal affection.
Among others, Plato distinguishes between agape—the spiritual, mental, or metaphysical aspect of togetherness with a
long-term perspective—and eros, which, even though not originally meant to be sexual by Plato, became over the
centuries the sensual part of the entire phenomenon of love (see Lee, 1973).
However, the more recent cornerstones of theory building, such as Freud’s psychoanalysis and Darwin’s theory propose
a tight link between love and sexual desire. Whereas Darwin (2004/1871) described love as an epiphenomenon of
reproductive instincts, the Freudian idea of Eros as an overwhelming sexual drive that motivates most of the human
behavior (Freud, 2000/1905) may similarly subsume love under the roof of sexual instincts.
Meanwhile, there is abundant social psychological evidence in support of the contention that in most people’s minds,
love and sex are tightly related—to the extent that most people find it hard to imagine passionate love in absent of sexual
desire (Hatfield & Rapson, 2005; Regan, Kocan, & Whitlock, 1999; Regan & Berscheid, 1999). On the other hand, the
strength of the link may vary with history, culture, education, and social values (see Aries & Dupies, 2000), and thus does
not seem to be fixed in human nature. To illustrate, whereas in the Victorian era, romantic love was considered to be a
delicate, spiritual feeling—the antithesis of crude, animal lust, modern Western societies, influenced by Freudian and
Darwinian thought abandoned this romantic view and accepted the idea that chaste love was simply a sublimated form of
carnal love (see Hatfield & Rapson, 2009). Moreover the strength of the link varies as a function of social values and
culture. To give some examples, in the US, males report having less problems imagining sex without love than females do
(Hatfield & Rapson, 2005), and in China, the link between love and romance seems to be generally less pronounced than in
Western cultures (Dion & Dion, 1988).

*Correspondence to: Jens Förster, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Social Psychology, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
E-mail: j.a.forster@uva.nl

Received 8 December 2008

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 22 April 2009
 Love; sex; and face versus verbal recognition; construal level; procedural priming 525

Recently, neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists joined in the discussion on whether love and lust are very
different systems (Diamond, 2003 and 2004; Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos, & Altemus, 2006) or are tightly linked
(Bartels & Zeki, 2000). Most prominently, Diamond’s (2003) biobehavioral theory on love and sexual desire outlined the
conceptual independency from a physiopsychological perspective. Diamond reports numerous empirical evidence for
such cases, for example showing that passionately sexual and more companionate characteristics of relationships typically
occur at different stages of love (Brezsnyak, Alle, Salz, Mattucci, & Hazan, 1996; Sprecher & Regan, 1998), that people’s
self-reports clearly demonstrate experiences of infatuation without sex (Tennov, 1979; see also Hatfield & Sprecher,
1986), and that same gender infatuations among heterosexuals happen without any indication for the existence of sexual
desire, at least according to self-reports (see for example, Brain, 1976; Williams, 1992). Moreover, the author reports
numerous animal studies confirming that sexual desire and attachment have both different social and biological
underpinnings. This being said, Diamond (2004) agrees that brain systems for passionate love, sexual desire, and
attachment do in fact communicate and coordinate with one another.
In this paper, I will focus more on the question when, where, and how love and lust produce different psychological
effects. Given that the concepts are closely linked but not identical, it seems worthwhile to examine when they influence
which psychological task. In the following section it will be suggested that procedural knowledge involved in situations of
love and sex will influence peoples’ recognition for faces and words. Love may involve a long-term perspective that will
activate a global processing style. Once elicited, global processing will in turn enhance face recognition. In contrast, sex
should trigger a short-term perspective which will elicit a local, detail oriented processing style. Local processing will in
turn facilitate recognition of words. This model will now be introduced in detail.

BACKGROUND OF A PROCESSING MODEL OF SEX AND LOVE

Romantic love can be defined as ‘‘feelings of infatuation and emotional bonding that are commonly associated with
romantic relationships’’ and sexual desire as the ‘‘wish, need, or drive to seek out sexual objects or to engage in sexual
activities’’ (see Diamond, 2003; Regan & Berscheid, 1995).
Beyond the feeling component of love and sex, people may have represented love and sex in memory together with
semantic information, goals, and procedures (Förster, Liberman & Friedman, 2007). Cognitive models on love and
relationships already accounted for semantic representations involved in partner perception (see Noller, 1996; Neff &
Karney, 2002, 2005; Rubin, 1970; Sternberg, 1986). In a nutshell, they all point to semantic networks of love containing
specific exemplars, attitudes, semantic associations, expectancies, behavioral manifestations, and images. While such
cognitive models have been given some attention, surprisingly, little is known about cognitive procedures, love and sex
may elicit. Procedural knowledge is the knowledge how we act and think in certain situations and it operates independent
of semantics. Such knowledge entails content free processing styles or ways to perceive the world (see Tulving & Schacter,
1990; see also Smith, 1989; Schooler, 2002), such as global versus local processing. One can for example look at the very
same stimulus (e.g., a set of four oranges) in a local way (e.g., looking at one orange only) or in a global way (e.g., looking
at the entire set). While semantically, the same concepts may be activated in both situations (e.g., orange, juice, fruit, etc.),
the way the stimulus set is perceived still differs. How do we perceive the world, when we think of love or sex?
I would like to suggest a processing model of love and lust that is based on construal level theory (CLT; for reviews see
Trope & Liberman, 2003; Liberman & Trope, 2008). It has been proposed that temporally distal events lead to global
processing whereas proximal events lead to a local processing style (Liberman & Trope, 1998). Because usually less is
known about distant future events, people naturally start thinking about distal situations in more abstract ways, whereas
proximal events are processed in a relatively more concrete manner. As a result of the constant co-occurrence of
temporarily distant events and abstractness, people may habitualize the link between distance and abstractness and may
spontaneously start processing information in more holistic ways whenever they think about a more distant event, with the
reverse being true for more proximal events.
There is immense empirical evidence for this theory. To give just one example, it has been shown that when asked to
think of ‘‘reading a book’’ a year from now people construe the event in more abstract terms (e.g., broadening ones
horizon) whereas when they think about doing it tomorrow their thoughts about reading the very same book are more
concrete (e.g., flipping pages; Liberman & Trope, 1998). Recently, it has also been shown that people attended to the local

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
526 Jens Förster

features of a stimulus set when they thought about a temporally proximal event whereas they attended to the global
features when they thought about a temporally distal event (Liberman & Förster, 2009).
The processing model of love and lust suggests that romantic love and sex differ with respect to temporal perspective
(see Buss & Schmitt, 1993). Romantic love typically involves a long-term goal or desire of staying together with a person;
love entails attachment goals (Mikulincer, 1998; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). It involves wishes of ‘‘foreverness’’ (Hazan
& Shaver, 1987) and contains a perspective on the distant future, which can be remote from concrete aspects of everyday
life. A global processing style may be elicited when people are in love. Goals triggered by sexual desire, however, are of a
more specific nature, involving physical features, specific strategies of seduction, or more concrete scripts of mating
behavior and fetishes (e.g., Beck, Borman, & Qualtrough, 1991). Sexual desire exists in the here and now and does not
necessarily involve a long-time perspective; a detail oriented, local processing style may support such goals. Consistent
with these predictions, a recent study provides preliminary evidence, showing that when participants were asked to
imagine love without sex they construed the event to happen in the more distant future compared to participants who were
asked to imagine sex without love (Förster, Özelsel, & Epstude, 2009).
In line with CLT it is further suggested that people habitualize the if-love (sex)-then global (local)-processing routine: if
people usually think globally when in love and locally when experiencing sex, a link may evolve so that subtle cues of love
versus sex may trigger the respective ways of processing. Because these processing styles have been related to face and
verbal recognition (Macrae & Lewis, 2002), it is predicted that love facilitates face recognition whereas sex facilitates
verbal recognition. This prediction is based on processing shift theory.

PROCESSING SHIFTS

Processing shift theory predicts that the processing styles activated in the course of engaging in one task remain active so
that they are carried over or ‘‘transferred’’ to subsequent tasks (Schooler, 2002; Schooler, Fiore, & Brandimonte, 1997).
‘‘Transfer-appropriate’’ processing shifts are said to result when the residually-activated procedures are beneficial for
subsequent processing, whereas ‘‘transfer-inappropriate’’ shifts are said to result when the procedures at hand impair
subsequent processing.
Mostly relevant to this paper, it has been suggested that face recognition underlies different psychological processes
than recognition of verbal information. Intriguingly, research on the verbal overshadowing effect even shows that verbal
descriptions of a face can serve to impair subsequent recognition of the face (Dodson, Johnson, & Schooler, 1997;
Fallshore & Schooler, 1995; Finger & Pezdek, 1999; Meissner, Brigham, & Kelley, 2001; Melcher & Schooler, 1996;
Ryan & Schooler, 1998; Schooler, Ohlsson & Brooks, 1993). For example, participants that were presented a videotape of
a simulated bank robbery showed impaired face recognition if, directly after the presentation, they had to write down a
verbal description of the event, compared to a control group that did not have to deliver such a description (Schooler and
Englster-Schooler, 1990). Why is this?
Presumably, verbal processing differs from face processing with respect to the strategy used when people process the
information. The strategy that has been shown to support encoding of faces is a holistic or global processing style (Michel,
Rossion, Han, Chung, & Caldara, 2006; Tanaka & Farah, 1993; Tanaka & Sengco, 1997; Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987),
whereas verbal processing is said to elicit a more local strategy, focusing on the details.
Maybe the most straightforward test of this hypothesis was an experiment by Macrae and Lewis (2002), showing that
performance in a recognition task was enhanced after a global processing task and was impeded when following a local
processing task relative to a non-primed control group. More specifically, after participants had watched the
aforementioned robbery tape, participants were asked to attend either the global features of a stimulus (a large letter that
was made of small letters, see Navon, 1977) or the details of this figure (the small letters the large letter was made of).
Results showed that having focused on the small letters reduced subsequent recognition accuracy, whereas having focused
on the large letters enhanced it.
In line with the notion of processing shifts, the following studies examine whether affective states, such as love and sex
which are related to different ways of processing would automatically influence face versus verbal recognition. Whereas
reminders of love, involving a long-time perspective enhances global processing and recognition of faces, sex, involving

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
 Love; sex; and face versus verbal recognition; construal level; procedural priming 527

rather concrete processing and short-term goals would facilitate encoding of verbal information. This hypothesis will be
tested in two experiments using both, supraliminal and subliminal priming procedures.

EXPERIMENT 1

Participants and Design

Forty-five university students (25 female, 20 male, average age was M ¼ 23.50; gender had no effects), majoring in
disciplines other than psychology, were recruited for a study on ‘‘perception and memory’’. Participants received 7 Euros
for participation. The design was a two factorial 3 Priming (Love vs. Sex vs. Control) X 2 Material (Face vs. Verbal) with
the first factors realized between and the latter within participants.

Procedure

Upon arrival, participants were asked to perform a task assessing their capability of imagining pleasant emotional events,
for which they would have 5 minutes. They were told that if the task would be too intimate, they could stop it without any
further consequences. In the love priming group they were told to imagine a long walk with their beloved partner and to try
to feel how much they love him or her; in case they were not presently in a relationship they should imagine a nice partner
they love. In the sex priming group they were asked to imagine a situation of casual sex with a person they were attracted to
but not in love with; a control group was asked to imagine a nice walk on their own. In all conditions participants were
asked to imagine the pleasure involved in this event and to write their thoughts down.
Afterwards, we administered a survey on the task and a mood questionnaire, to control for potential influences of affect.
The survey asked how difficult they had found the imagination task, how embarrassing it had been, how much they had
liked the task and how much they had liked the event they had imagined on scales anchored at 1 (not at all) to 9 (very
much). A mood questionnaire was designed to assess current mood of participants (‘‘How do you feel right now?’’) on a
scale from 1 (very bad) to 9 (very good), and emotions: how ‘‘happy’’, ‘‘worried’’, ‘‘scared’’, ‘‘relaxed’’, ‘‘nervous’’,
‘‘down’’, ‘‘disappointed’’, ‘‘joyful’’, ‘‘loving’’, ‘‘calm’’, ‘‘tense’’, ‘‘depressed’’, ‘‘sexually aroused’’, and ‘‘relieved’’ they
currently felt on a scale anchored at 1 (not at all) and 9 (extremely).
Next, as an allegedly unrelated task, participants were asked to learn portraits and person descriptions for a later
recognition task. For the visual task, 50 black and white photographs, each depicting a portrait of Caucasian male persons
were taken from a college book. Twenty-five were randomly chosen as targets, whereas 25 served as distractors in the
recognition task. Pictures were presented on a computer (presentation time: 3000 miliseconds; inter-stimulus interval:
1 second.). For the verbal task, 50 short descriptions presumably describing actual persons were produced from which one-
half was randomly selected as targets and the other half as distractors for the recognition test (presentation time: 5 seconds;
inter stimulus interval: 1 sec). Order of tasks was counterbalanced and order had no effects. The recognition tasks were
handed out 20 minutes after learning. Interviews at the end of the session suggest that no participant saw a relation between
the two tasks.

RESULTS

Emotions and Imagination Survey

We tested influences on emotions or survey questions with separate 3 (Piming) ANOVAs, respectively. There were no
effects on most of the ratings, all Fs < 1, with two exceptions: participants felt more ‘‘loving’’ after they thought about
love, M ¼ 6.33; SD ¼ 1.45, compared to the control group M ¼ 4.73; SD ¼ 1.91, or the group that imagined a one night
stand, M ¼ 4.67; SD ¼ 1.92; F (2,42) ¼ 4.26; p ¼ .02. Furthermore, participants that thought about sex reported higher

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
528 Jens Förster

sexual arousal, M ¼ 5.60; SD ¼ 1.55, than participants that thought about love, M ¼ 3.40; SD ¼ 1.55, or those in the control
condition, M ¼ 3.20; SD ¼ 1.86; F (2,42) ¼ 9.66; p < .0001. When asked, 60% in the sex priming, 80% in the walk
priming, and 73% in the love priming reported to have had experienced a similar event before.
Two experts examined the events people imagined with respect to abstractness of the stories, time perspective involved
in the stories (amount of thoughts pointing to the future), valence of content and whether more actions than states were
used. The only result was a difference in time perspective: participants primed with love reported more wishes, goals, or
events that related to future events, M ¼ 1.47; SD ¼ 1.30, compared to participants primed with sex, M ¼ 0.1; SD ¼ .35, or
those in the control group, M ¼ 0.2; SD ¼ .77; F (2,42) ¼ 10.5; p < .0001. Unfortunately, because in the control condition
only one, and in the sex priming condition only two participants mentioned an event taking place in the distant future, this
variable could not be used in further mediation analyses. However, the results show that peoples’ thoughts are more
directed toward the future when they imagine love. Two different experts checked whether participants followed
instructions and found that in the love condition nobody mentioned any sexual contents, whereas in the sex condition
nobody mentioned contents related to love.

Recognition

We used the measure Pr (Hits–False Alarms) from two—high threshold theory (Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988) for assessing
recognition accuracy which is an analog of the index d’ of signal detection theory (Green & Swets, 1966). However,
because d’ indexes can lead to unwanted biases when relatively few trials are used, Pr is the appropriate measure for our set
that contained 100 trials (when using d́, the same results were obtained). Results are summarized in Table 1 and showed
that participants’ discriminate ability for faces Pr was reliably higher after the love prime (M ¼ .65; SD ¼ .16) than after
the sex prime (M ¼ .38; SD ¼ .23) with the control group falling in between, (M ¼ .51; SD ¼ .14); this however, was
reversed for Pr of words (Mlove ¼ .14; SD ¼ .23; Msex ¼ .45; SD ¼ .16; Mcontrol ¼ .29; SD ¼ .22). As predicted, a 3
2
ANOVA on z transformed PR values for faces and words yielded a significant two-way interaction, F(2,42) ¼ 15.89,
p < .0001. There were no main effects, Fs < 1.
Contrast analyses showed that for PR for faces, the differences between love and sex priming, t (42) ¼ 4.01; p < . 001;
between love and control priming, t (42) ¼ 2.05; p < .05; and between sex and control priming, t (42) ¼ 1.97; p < . 06 were
(marginally) significant. For PR for words, the differences between love and sex priming, t (42) ¼ 4.05; p < . 001;
between love and control priming, t (42) ¼ 2.00; p < .05; and between sex and control priming, t (42) ¼ 2.04; p < . 05
were significant.
We checked for mediation by moods by entering reported moods separately and jointly to the analysis, and found no
reduction of significance. Thus, no indication for mediation was found. Notably, even though we think that affect can
change such processing styles (see Gasper & Clore, 2002), full blown moods are not necessary to produce the effects. In
our studies, mere reminders of love or sex seemed to trigger processing styles, because they simply remind people of what
they typically do in these situations.
In Experiment 2, we replicated the study with important differences: first, for the dependent variable, we now showed a
movie clip together with verbal comments, gave no learning instructions and checked recognition of face and verbal
information after a longer delay. Thus, the material is closer to everyday situations and the learning is incidental rather than
intentional. Second, we primed love and sex subliminally, which is probably the most stringent test of our assumption that
the processing shifts occur out of awareness. Third, we will assess global versus local processing in between the priming
and the test phase to get more direct evidence for the suggested mediator. Fourth, we included happiness as a prime to see
whether the long-term perspective drives the effect. Pretests have found that happiness is equally abstract and positive as

Table 1. Mean recognition (Pr)for words and faces as a function of love, sex, and control priming
Recognition task Love priming Control priming Sex priming

Words 0.14 (0.23) 0.29 (0.22) 0.44 (0.16)

Faces 0.65 (0.16) 0.51 (0.14) 0.38 (0.23)
Note. The numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
 Love; sex; and face versus verbal recognition; construal level; procedural priming 529

love but does not involve the long-term perspective. Thus, by priming happiness we can control for abstractness or valence
as possible alternative factors producing effects (Gasper & Clore, 2002).

EXPERIMENT 2

Participants and Design

Only differences from Experiment 1 will be described here. Sixty-four other students were recruited (32 women; 32 men;
average age: 23.40 y.; gender had no effects) under the same conditions as in Experiment 1. The design was a two factorial
4 Priming (Love vs. Sex vs. Happiness vs. Control) X 2 Material (Face vs. Verbal) with the first factor between and the
second factor within participants.

Procedure

The imagination task was replaced by a subliminal priming task (see Chartrand & Bargh, 1996; Mussweiler & Förster,
2000). Participants were primed with either ‘‘love’’, ‘‘sex’’, ‘‘happiness’’1, or with a non-word letter string ‘‘XQFBZ’’ in
the control condition (presentation time was 70 miliseconds) under the pretext of an attention task: Brief flashes would
appear on the screen at unpredictable places and times and they had to indicate as quickly and accurately as possible
whether the flash appeared on the right or the left side of the screen by pressing designated keys. We closely followed
recommendations by Chartrand and Bargh (1996), including all suggested precautions for preventing conscious awareness
of the priming stimuli, such as very brief presentation of the primes, immediate masking, and placement of stimulus
content in the parafoveal processing area (for detailed descriptions see Mussweiler & Förster, 2000). All participants
completed 48 experimental trials, which took approximately 2 minutes.
After priming, the above mentioned mood questionnaire was administered, followed by a global/local task (Figure 1;
Gasper & Clore, 2002) that was introduced as an alleged visual matching task. Participants had to decide as quickly as

Figure 1. Task, assessing relative global processing. Participants indicated whether the above presented target figure more closely
resembles the left of the right sample. In this example, choice of the left sample indicates global processing, whereas choice of the right
sample indicates local processing. Forty-eight trials were given and number of global choices were counted as relative global processing

1
These primes had been pretested in a recent study (Förster et al., 2009). Note that the study was run in Germany and that in German, love is more
narrowly related to romantic love than in other languages. The word is also not that often used, since for expressing liking toward people or objects that are
not ones’ partners one would not use ‘‘to love’’ (lieben), but rather would use ‘‘I like’’ (ich mag). Moreover, sex is related to sexual behavior and thoughts,
but not to ‘‘gender’’ (which in German is ‘‘Geschlecht’’). Pretests have found with a similar sample that happiness, sex and love did not differ with respect
to valence, abstractness, or whether it reminds people more of states or actions.

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
530 Jens Förster

possibly by pressing one of two designated keys whether a target figure looked more like one of the sample figures
presented. The target was a figure (e.g., a square) made of other small figures (e.g., triangles) and the samples were large
figures made of the same figures (e.g., sample 1 triangle made of triangles and sample 2 a square made of squares). The size
of the targets and samples and the number of small figures that constituted the large ones varied. We counted the number of
global choices (in this example sample 2 would count) out of 48 trials as the dependent measure of global processing.
Next, a movie was presented as an unrelated task. The clip (running time 74 seconds) starts at one end of the university
cantina moving to the other focusing on people during lunch. The clip contains a quite subtle crime scene. The ‘‘thief’’
comes in view about 35 seconds after the start of the movie. He approaches the table and kneels in order to, allegedly, tie
his shoe laces. At that moment, he, unobserved by anyone, takes the keys from a girl’s bag. He stands up and leaves the
scene. Throughout the entire movie presentation, the sounds coming from the cantina are dampened and a voice recording
of a description of the usual student lunch is superimposed on the movie. There were two versions of the verbal description.
The yes/no recognition tasks were handed out 30 minutes after the encoding phase. Face recognition consisted of 20
pictures, 10 of which had actually been presented and 10 were distractors. Word recognition consisted of 21 targets that
were words taken from the comments and 21 distractors. Because of the two versions for the comments, we used the same
words as targets for half of the participants and as distractors for the other half. Finally, 12 pictures were presented on the
computer and participants had to identify the thief. They could refuse this question, if they were not sure. When asked,
participants did not notice any relations among the alleged studies, nor did anybody notice that the priming task contained
words. We also checked for relationship status (longer in a relationship, newly in love, or just dumped). This variable had
no effects.

RESULTS

Emotions

There were no effects, all Fs < 1. This lack of priming emotions by emotionally laden constructs is consistent with the
literature. Recently, Innes-Ker and Niedenthal (2002) showed unscrambling emotional sentences (e.g., ‘‘to succumbed
sorrow she’’) did not have any effects on self-reported emotions, while this same priming task had been pretested to
facilitate lexical decision for mood congruent words. Although null effects are hard to interpret, the null findings with
eliciting mood by semantic priming were replicated in five experiments with more than 500 participants. Thus, it seems
that mere exposure to words with emotional content does not necessarily induce congruent mood. This would also mean
that in our studies any effects found would be caused independent from experienced, full blown emotions.

The Global/Local Task

A 4 (Priming) ANOVA for the dependent measure of global choices was conducted. Results showed that participants
selected more global samples after the love prime (M ¼ 42.50; SD ¼ 3.48) than after the sex prime (M ¼ 28.63;
SD ¼ 11.27), with the control group, (M ¼ 35.31; SD ¼ 6.37) and the happiness groups falling in between (M ¼ 30.38;
SD ¼ 8.37); F(3,60) ¼ 9.90, p < .0001.

Recognition

Only four participants correctly identified the thief and all of them were in the love priming condition (25%);
F(3,60) ¼ 5.00; p ¼ .004.
Participants’ discriminate ability for faces Pr (see Table 2) was reliably higher after the love prime (M ¼ .18; SD ¼ .21)
than after the sex prime (M ¼ .21; SD ¼ .26), with the control group (M ¼ .03; SD ¼ .21) and the happiness group falling
in between (M ¼ .04; SD ¼ .15). This was reversed for Pr of words (Mlove ¼ .05; SD ¼ .22; Msex ¼ .32; SD ¼ .26;
Mcontrol ¼ .07; SD ¼ .38; Mhappiness ¼ .06; SD ¼ .46). Similar to Experiment 1, we conducted a 4
2 ANOVA on z

Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 524–535 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
 Love; sex; and face versus verbal recognition; construal level; procedural priming 531

Table 2. Mean recognition (Pr)for words and faces as a function of love, sex, happiness, and control priming
Recognition Task Love priming Control priming Sex priming Happiness priming

Words 0.05 (0.22) 0.07 (0.38) 0.32 (0.27) 0.06 (0.46)

Faces 0.18 (0.21) 0.03 (0.21) 0.21 (0.26) 0.04 (0.15)
Note. The numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.

transformed PR values for faces and words and the two way interaction was significant, F(3,60) ¼ 7.97, p < .0001. The
main effects were not significant, Fs < 1.1.
Contrast analyses showed that for PR for faces, the differences between love and sex priming, t (60) ¼ 5.08; p < . 001;
between love and happiness priming, t (60) ¼ 2.91; p < . 005; between sex and happiness priming, t (60) ¼ 2.16; p < . 04;
between sex priming and control group, t (60) ¼ 3.08; p < . 003; and between love priming and control group t
(60) ¼ 1.99; p < . 05, were significant, whereas, as predicted, the difference between happiness priming and control group
was not, t < 1. Similar analyses using Pr for words showed significant differences between love and sex priming, t
(60) ¼ 3.05; p < . 003; between sex and happiness priming, t (60) ¼ 2.17; p < .03; and between sex priming and control
group, t (60) ¼ 2.12; p < .04. Differences between love and happiness prime, between love priming and control group, and
between happiness priming and control group were not significant, ts < 1. That is, in this experiment, whereas sex priming
increased word recognition and decreased face recognition, love priming improved face recognition, however, it did not
decrease word recognition significantly to a control group. Comparing sex and love, however, the predicted results were
obtained. As predicted, the happiness prime, did not produce any significant differences compared with the control group2.
This indicates that abstractness or valence of a concept per se did not drive the results obtained in our studies.
We entered moods separately and jointly to the analyses, and found no reduction of significance: again, no mediation
was found.

Mediation Analysis

We conducted two mediation analyses, strictly following the recommendations by Baron and Kenny (1986). Two separate
regression analyses for words and faces showed that the higher the relative global processing was, the worse the
performance on word recognition was, b ¼ .408, t(62) ¼ 3.51, p < .001; and the higher the performance on face
recognition was, b ¼ .530, t(62) ¼ 4.93, p < .0001. We coded love as þ1 and sex as 1 and found a significant positive
correlation with relative global processing (the expected mediator), b ¼ .652, t(29) ¼ 4.71, p < .0001. Next, the
independent variable as well as relative global processing were entered jointly to the dependent variables, respectively.
The effect of global processing was still significant in the analysis for both word recognition, b ¼ .558, t (29) ¼ 3.44,
p ¼ .002, and face recognition, b ¼ .518, t(29) ¼ 3.18, p ¼ .003. The influence of love versus sex priming, however, was
significantly reduced for both word recognition, b ¼ .254, t (29) ¼ 1.57, p ¼ .128, and face recognition, b ¼ .298, t
(29) ¼ 1.83, p ¼ .078 (word recognition; Z ¼ 2.65, p ¼ .008; face recognition; Z ¼ 2.53, p ¼ .01). The analysis thus
reflects that the relative global processing after the priming partially mediated face and word recognition.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The research shows that face recognition is enhanced by reminders of love whereas verbal recognition is enhanced after
reminders of sex. While such facilitation effects are consistent with predictions, impairments were less pronounced in the
studies. More specifically, in Experiment 2, we failed to find reduced verbal recognition when participants were primed
with love. It is possible that this lack of effect is just a failure to replicate this aspect of Experiment 1 with a subliminal
2
These results may seem surprising since in Gasper & Clore’s (2002) studies, effects of positive moods on global processing were found. However, in their
studies, it is not clear whether happiness, general mood or any other positive emotion drove effects. Furthermore, the effects reported here are different
from mood effects since mood was simply not elicited upon subliminal priming. It is possible then that the cognitive component of emotional concepts can
trigger effects different from the arousal component or an emotion.

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DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
532 Jens Förster

priming procedure, however, research in the relationship literature points to some interesting alternative interpretation:
Neff and Karney’s (2005) convincingly showed that happy spouses can keep globally favorable representations of their
partners over a long time, while they are constantly increasing accuracy for the specific details, which may also include
negative aspects. Thus, in happy couples, people can be accurate at a concrete level while still loving their partners overall
(e.g., ‘‘Yes, he is a bad car driver, but that’s cute!’’). Our results suggest further that when in love, verbal recognition may
not be always impaired (by still showing a face recognition advantage), whereas sexual cues do reduce the ability to
remember faces (by still showing a relative local processing advantage). Thus, it is possible that in certain situations of
love people can have both, improved memory for faces and fairly good recognition for verbal information. Further
research is needed to examine such asymmetries.
Study 2 shows that local versus global processing styles partially mediate the effects on face versus verbal recognition.
The mediation findings are striking because they point to perceptual mechanisms elicited by semantic concepts that further
influence more complex tasks. Recently, such links between perception and higher level cognition gained a lot of attention
in cognitive psychology (Barsalou, 1999; Finke, 1985; Gilbert, 1991; Masson, 1995). Most prominently, Barsalou (1999)
proposed that high level cognition is grounded in experiences and perception (see Förster, 2009), and the studies above
might exemplify such a striking relation. Thus, it seems worthwhile to study the perceptual consequences of semantic or
affective concepts more carefully.
Notably, global perception has been argued to influence other variables, such as creativity, understanding of metaphors,
humor, and abstract information (Beeman, 1998; Friedman & Förster, 2005). Future research may find influences of love
versus sex on such tasks as well and may find similar mediation by perception (see Förster et al., 2009). Interestingly, in a
recent study, Griskevicius, Cialdini, and Kenrick (2006) showed that when primed with love, participants became more
creative. Our findings suggest a mediation of this effect by global processing. Furthermore, recent research on the brain
situated the processing styles in different locations, namely, global processing in the right hemisphere and local processing
in the left hemisphere (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994). Our data may open new areas for brain researchers, such as whether
different types of emotional situations are represented or processed in different parts of the brain.

Priming Emotional Concepts

Our experiments cannot be explained by valence, since neither mood nor valence of primes drove the effects. Note that in
Experiment 1 no differences in liking of the imagination were found and that in Experiment 2 the happiness versus love
primes did not differ with respect to valence.
The lacking effect of priming on moods is consistent with others (Innes-Ker and Niedenthal, 2002), yet, the current
studies show that reminding people of emotional concepts can still influence processing styles. Our results do not
contradict but rather add to the literature on moods and processing styles (see Fredrickson, 2001; Gasper & Clore, 2002),
showing that while emotional arousal can broaden or narrow perception, reminding people of certain concepts can trigger
processing styles in its own rights (see Friedman & Förster, 2008). It is interesting to investigate in future research more
carefully whether temporal distance mediates these effects.
Notably, emotions differ with respect to their long- versus short-term perspective. Anger for example may be relatively
short-lived compared to hate and thus it might follow that anger leads to a local processing style while hate leads to a global
one. If such a distinction holds, the cognitive consequences of such elicited processing styles may have far reaching
implications: Is anger related to focusing too much to the details in an intergroup conflict? Does hate on the other hand lead
to a global, generalized perception of outgroup members (and people in general)?
More generally, such rather under examined ‘‘cold links’’ between emotional concepts and perception suggest that not
everything that is related to love or sex is emotional in the sense of triggering appetitive (or aversive) arousals, yet
emotional concepts and situations may have their own effects on how people process information.

Limitations and Implications of the Research

The presented research certainly carries a number of limitations. For example it is clear that subliminal priming is not the
way to simulate all aspects of the full blown situations of sex or love. The main intention of this research however was to

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DOI: 10.1002/ejsp
 Love; sex; and face versus verbal recognition; construal level; procedural priming 533

show that even subtle reminders of such situations can trigger different ways to process information that may as well be
observed in real situations. Moreover, one may wonder what the current findings tell us about partner perception in real
life. It is not clearly functional that people in situations of sex encode words better than faces. However, still, this effect
may be an epiphenomenon of a rather functional phenomenon, namely that people think globally when in love, and that
they think locally when having sex.
To illustrate, global processing may serve to continue a relationship despite the concrete hassles of everyday life that
couples may face. Anchoring evaluations in the future rather than the present may for example lead to an overall positive
picture, and having a positive image of a partner was shown to actually improve the partner (see Murray, Holmes, &
Griffin, 1996a,b). This in the end may support the goal of staying together for a longer time. Thus, while such a correlation
may have evolved because it is supportive to goal attainment, proceduralization of such connection (when in love then
think globally) could have effects on variables that profit from elicited processing styles but operate beyond functional
considerations. More research is needed to learn more about the functionalities and more research is needed to examine
consequences for partner perception.
Future research may further investigate more thoroughly personality, gender, and cultural differences. Note that in our
studies, no gender differences were found. It could be the case that both males and females in our sample simply did not
differ with respect to love or attachment (sex) involving a long-term (short-term) perspective. However, future research
may find that when sex and love are subjectively highly interconnected as in certain individuals, effects may be diluted.

Final Remarks

Finally, our results speak for the general independence of love and sex. While semantics of love and sex share many
overlaps, they can also trigger different effects on the level of cognitive procedures. Sex is not necessarily related to
attachment and love is not necessarily related to sexual arousal. In these clear cut cases—which may not exist in some
cultures or individuals—they have different effects on how people perceive the world. Note, however, that our research, if
it replicates in other cultures, could lead to the conclusion that unconsciously, sexual desires are more different from love
or attachment goals than people (consciously) think they are. With respect to sex one may then ask the age long question
again: What’s love got to do with it?

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