Abstract
In our previous study, we have proposed a three-stage model of emotion processing; in the current study, we investigated whether the ERP component may be different when the emotional content of stimuli is task-irrelevant. In this study, a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task was used to investigate how the emotional content of words modulates the time course of neural dynamics. Participants performed the task in which affectively positive, negative, and neutral adjectives were rapidly presented while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 18 undergraduates. The N170 component was enhanced for negative words relative to positive and neutral words. This indicates that automatic processing of negative information occurred at an early perceptual processing stage. In addition, later brain potentials such as the late positive potential (LPP) were only enhanced for positive words in the 480–580-ms post-stimulus window, while a relatively large amplitude signal was elicited by positive and negative words between 580 and 680 ms. These results indicate that different types of emotional content are processed distinctly at different time windows of the LPP, which is in contrast with the results of studies on task-relevant emotional processing. More generally, these findings suggest that a negativity bias to negative words remains to be found in emotion-irrelevant tasks, and that the LPP component reflects dynamic separation of emotion valence.
Highlights
Emotional stimuli can be processed preferentially and draw attention quickly
This study investigated the time course of emotional word processing using a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task
Our behavioral data showed that the accuracy for affectively positive and negative adjectives was higher than the accuracy for neutral adjectives
Summary
Emotional stimuli can be processed preferentially and draw attention quickly. From an evolutionary perspective, preferential and quick responses to emotional stimuli are considered biologically adaptive (Schupp et al, 2006; Vuilleumier and Pourtois, 2007). Lei et al (2017) showed that P2 play an important role in the unconscious processing of emotional words Following these early effects, modulation of later time segments of ERPs by affective words has been reported, such as the N170 component, measured over the occipito-temporal regions (Williams et al, 2006). We assumed that the modulatory effect of emotional words on the N170 component may be taskdependent If so, this further implies that the processing of emotional words is incompatible with the three-stage scheme in emotion-irrelevant tasks, in which attention is not explicitly directed toward the emotional content of the stimuli. We predicted that compared to the positive words and neutral words, negative affect words would elicit a larger N170 component, and different types of emotional content may be processed distinctly at different time windows of LPP
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