Existing research suggests that individual personality differences can
influence performance with visualizations. In addition to stable traits such
as locus of control, research in psychology has found that temporary changes
in affect (emotion) can significantly impact individual performance on
cognitive tasks. We examine the relationship between fundamental visual
judgement tasks and affect through a crowdsourced user study that combines
affective-priming techniques from psychology with longstanding graphical
perception experiments. Our results suggest that affective-priming can
significantly influence accuracy in visual judgements, and that some chart
types may be more affected than others.