Impact of Unconscious Emotional Schemata on Verbal Fluency – Sex Differences and Neural Mechanisms

Abstract

Many factors such as intelligence, age, education, and sex may have an important influence on verbal fluency according to literature. The aim of this study is to examine the possible impact of the emotional schemata associated with sex differences on verbal fluency performances. Four tasks of verbal fluency were used in this study: two tasks of semantic verbal fluency (Animals, Vehicles) and two tasks of affective verbal fluency (Pleasant-Joy, Unpleasant-Fear). The results were analysed for 302 adults aged 18 to 70 years old. The number of correctly enumerated words, the number of phonemic clusters, the number of semantic clusters, and the number of phonemic and semantic switches were recorded. The results confirmed data that sex explains a little variance of results in verbal fluency performance; sex is not a predictor of semantic verbal fluency, but a significant predictor for emotional verbal fluency. Significant differences in verbal fluency between men and women were found only in emotional tasks. The hypothesis about the unconscious emotional schemata and linguistic fluency associated with sex differences was formulated. NeuroQuantology | September 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 3 | Page 443-450