Abstract
The present event-related potential (ERP) study explored whether masked emotion-laden words could facilitate the processing of both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in a valence judgment task. The results revealed that emotion-laden words as primes failed to influence target emotion-label word processing, whereas emotion-laden words facilitated target emotion-laden words in the congruent condition. Specifically, decreased late positivity complex (LPC) was elicited by emotion-laden words primed by emotion-laden words of the same valence than those primed by emotion-laden words of different valence. Nevertheless, no difference was observed for emotion-label words as targets. These findings supported the mediated account that claimed emotion-laden words engendered emotion via the mediation of emotion-label words and hypothesized that emotion-laden words could not prime emotion-label words in the masked priming paradigm. Moreover, this study provided additional evidence showing the distinction between emotion-laden words and emotion-label words.
Highlights
Across various studies of different languages, it has been consistently found that emotion-label words and emotion-laden words differ in a variety of tasks, such as lexical decision task (Kazanas and Altarriba, 2015, 2016a,b; Zhang et al, 2017, 2018a), flanker task (Wu and Zhang, 2019a; Zhang et al, 2019a,b), and affective Simon task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown, 2011)
A larger late positivity complex (LPC) was elicited by the target emotion-laden words that were preceded by the different valence emotion-laden words (1.17 μV) than those that were preceded by the same valence emotion-laden words (0.64 μV)
We investigated whether emotion-laden words as primes could influence target emotion-label and emotion-laden words in the masked priming paradigm
Summary
Across various studies of different languages, it has been consistently found that emotion-label words and emotion-laden words differ in a variety of tasks, such as lexical decision task (Kazanas and Altarriba, 2015, 2016a,b; Zhang et al, 2017, 2018a), flanker task (Wu and Zhang, 2019a; Zhang et al, 2019a,b), and affective Simon task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown, 2011). Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies found that more substantial brain activation was evoked by emotion-label words than emotion-laden words in both Chinese (Zhang et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2019) and English (Zhang et al, 2018a) in a lexical decision task. Affective picture valence judgment was facilitated by preceding emotion-label words over emotion-laden words with accentuated processing speed and weaker electrophysiological responses, and the facilitation effect was found in both Chinese (Wu et al, 2020) and English (Wu et al, 2019)
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