Abstract
It is controversial whether mood affects cognition by triggering specific processing strategies or by limiting processing resources. The current event-related potential (ERP) study pursued this issue by examining how mood modulates the processing of task relevant/irrelevant information. In question-answer pairs, a question context marked a critical word in the answer sentence as focus (and thus relevant) or non-focus (thereby irrelevant). At the same time, participants were exposed to either a pleasant or unpleasant odor to elicit different mood states. Overall, we observed larger N400s when the critical words in the answer sentences were semantically incongruent (rather than congruent) with the question context. However, such N400 effect was only found for focused words accompanied by a pleasant odor and for both focused and non-focused words accompanied by an unpleasant odor, but not for non-focused words accompanied by a pleasant odor. These results indicate top-down attentional shift to the focused information in a positive mood state and non-selective attention allocated to the focused and non-focused information in a less positive mood state, lending support to the “processing strategy” hypothesis. By using a novel approach to induce mood states, our study provides fresh insights into the mechanisms underlying mood modulation of language comprehension.
Highlights
Positive mood Rely on information structure: F >NF Sufficient resources for both F and NF: F =NF
No participant guessed that the purpose of the experiment was to examine the influence of mood on language processing, 14 out of 24 participants reported that the smells had affected their mood
It seems that a word’s congruency with the previous context is not fully considered when it is not the critical word targeted by the question sentence, whereas in a less positive mood, semantic relations of all words, regardless whether they are critical to the current sentential context or not, are processed up to a certain level which gives rise to the N400 effect
Summary
Positive mood Rely on information structure: F >NF Sufficient resources for both F and NF: F =NF. The “processing resources” model predicts similar processes between task relevant and irrelevant stimuli in a positive mood due to sufficient amount of processing resources but different processes in a negative mood due to limited amount of processing resources. According to the “processing strategy” theory, people in a positive mood allocate their attention primarily to focused words because of their relevance to the current mental setup, leading to larger N400 effects; people in a negative mood adopt a bottom-up processing strategy and treat the focused and non-focused words leading to comparable N400 effects. Accumulated evidence indicates that pleasant scents tend to have positive effects on mood whereas unpleasant smells tend to have negative effects[30,31,32,33,34] This suggests that odors are natural affective carriers which modulate receiver’s internal state. The use of olfactory stimuli allows us to attain clear insights into the mechanism of mood effect on language comprehension without obvious confounding influences from other mental processes
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