Abstract
Even single words in isolation can evoke emotional reactions, but the mechanisms by which emotion is involved in automatic lexical processing are unclear. Previous studies using extremely similar materials and methods have yielded apparently incompatible patterns of results. In much previous work, however, words' emotional content is entangled with other non-emotional characteristics such as frequency of occurrence, familiarity and age of acquisition, all of which have potential consequences for lexical processing themselves. In the present study, the authors compare different models of emotion using the British Lexicon Project, a large-scale freely available lexical decision database. After controlling for the potentially confounding effects of non-emotional variables, a variety of statistical approaches revealed that emotional words, whether positive or negative, are processed faster than neutral words. This effect appears to be categorical rather than graded; is not modulated by emotional arousal; and is not limited to words explicitly referring to emotions. The authors suggest that emotional connotations facilitate processing due to the grounding of words' meanings in emotional experience.
Highlights
Even single words in isolation can evoke emotional reactions, but the mechanisms by which emotion is involved in automatic lexical processing are unclear
Emotional content even plays a role in automatic lexical processing of single words, as indicated by reliable effects of emotional valence in lexical decision, a relatively shallow task in which words must be distinguished from non-words (e.g., Estes & Adelman, 2008a, 2008b; Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, 2011; Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009; Larsen, Mercer, Balota, & Strube, 2008)
From the full set of words in the BLP, we selected those 1374 words for which valence ratings were available from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) (Bradley & Lang, 1999), or from the additional ratings described in Kousta et al (2009, 2011)
Summary
Even single words in isolation can evoke emotional reactions, but the mechanisms by which emotion is involved in automatic lexical processing are unclear. Emotional content even plays a role in automatic lexical processing of single words, as indicated by reliable effects of emotional valence in lexical decision, a relatively shallow task in which words must be distinguished from non-words (e.g., Estes & Adelman, 2008a, 2008b; Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, & Del Campo, 2011; Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009; Larsen, Mercer, Balota, & Strube, 2008) While all of these studies provide support. VINSON, PONARI, VIGLIOCCO for the involvement of words’ emotional characteristics in their processing, the precise mechanisms involved still remain entirely unclear This is because different studies of lexical processing have found different and apparently incompatible results even when the same task (e.g., lexical decision) is used
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