Emotionally positive stimuli facilitate lexical decisions—An ERP study

Abstract

The influence of briefly presented positive and negative emotional pictures on lexical decisions on positive, negative and neutral words or pseudowords was investigated. Behavioural reactions were the fastest following all positive stimuli and most accurate for positive words. Stimulus-locked ERPs revealed enhanced early posterior and late parietal attention effects following positive pictures. A small neural affective priming effect was reflected by P3 modulation, indicating more attention allocation to affectively incongruent prime-target pairs. N400 was insensitive to emotion. Response-locked ERPs revealed an early fronto-central negativity from 480ms before reactions to positive words. It was generated in both fronto-central and extra-striate visual areas, demonstrating a contribution of perceptual and, notably, motor preparation processes. Thus, no behavioural and little neural evidence for congruency-driven affective priming with emotional pictures was found, but positive stimuli generally facilitated lexical decisions, not only enhancing perception, but also acting rapidly on response preparation and by-passing full semantic analysis.