How previous experience shapes future affective subjective ratings: A follow-up study investigating implicit learning and cue ambiguity

We all use our prior experiences to predict new events in our daily lives. This ability is especially important when we are called upon to predict (and prepare for) salient and significant stimuli such as emotional stimuli. Of crucial importance in these cases is the ability to use previously learned information, often at an implicit level, in new and potentially ambiguous contexts.
In this recent research, carried out in collaboration with Prof. Suzanne Oosterwijk of the University of Amsterdam, we investigated in a first experiment whether prior experiences (studied in terms of certain or uncertain probabilistic relationships between emotional stimuli) can be learned at the implicit level and used at a later time to make new emotional predictions at the subjective level. In addition, in a second experiment, we investigated whether prior emotional experiences generalize to new contexts with characteristics of ambiguity.
We used an experimental paradigm of implicit learning, manipulating the reliability of prior experiences in the direction of total certainty or uncertainty, and we measured participants' subjective ratings of expectancy, pleasantness/unpleasantness, and arousal during a subsequent emotional prediction task.
The results suggest that implicit prior learning fails to consistently modulate subsequent subjective emotional experience, while in the presence of new ambiguous environmental information subjective emotional experience is dampened.

Del Popolo Cristaldi, F., Buodo, G., Gambarota, F., Oosterwijk, S., & Mento, G. (2024). How previous experience shapes future affective subjective ratings: A follow-up study investigating implicit learning and cue ambiguity. Plos one, 19(2), e0297954