Abstract
It is well-documented that both emotion-label words (e.g., sadness, happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., death, wedding) can induce emotion activation. However, the neural correlates of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words recognition have not been examined. The present study aimed to compare the underlying neural responses when processing the two kinds of words by employing event-related potential (ERP) measurements. Fifteen Chinese native speakers were asked to perform a lexical decision task in which they should judge whether a two-character compound stimulus was a real word or not. Results showed that (1) emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicited similar P100 at the posteriors sites, (2) larger N170 was found for emotion-label words than for emotion-laden words at the occipital sites on the right hemisphere, and (3) negative emotion-label words elicited larger Late Positivity Complex (LPC) on the right hemisphere than on the left hemisphere while such effect was not found for emotion-laden words and positive emotion-label words. The results indicate that emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicit different cortical responses at both early (N170) and late (LPC) stages. In addition, right hemisphere advantage for emotion-label words over emotion-laden words can be observed in certain time windows (i.e., N170 and LPC) while fails to be detected in some other time window (i.e., P100). The implications of the current findings for future emotion research were discussed.
Highlights
Emotion is essential for the adaption and survival of human beings (Damasio, 2001)
By using the British Lexicon Project database (Keuleers et al, 2012), Vinson et al (2014) demonstrated that both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words were processed faster than neutral words and the recognition speeds were similar for emotion-label words and emotion-laden words, even after controlling many cofounding variables such as word frequency and word familiarity. These findings suggested that the emotion activation was restricted to emotion words that explicitly describe emotion states, and was detected among emotion-laden words, and more importantly, the emotion activation was comparable between emotion-label words and emotion-laden words
Founded on robust findings of event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotion words (i.e., P100, N170, and Late Positivity Complex (LPC)), the current study aims to investigate the neural responses to the processing of emotionlabel words and emotion-laden words
Summary
There are two widely explored dimensions including valence and arousal in existing emotion research (Lang et al, 1997). Regardless of valence, have been found to processed faster than neutral words and this phenomenon is known as emotion effect (Kousta et al, 2009; Vinson et al, 2014). This effect is accompanied with higher physiological activation for emotion words than neutral words (Citron, 2012)
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