The emotion potential of simple sentences: additive or interactive effects of nouns and adjectives?

Jana Lüdtke,Arthur M Jacobs

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01137

Abstract

The vast majority of studies on affective processes in reading focus on single words. The most robust finding is a processing advantage for positively valenced words, which has been replicated in the rare studies investigating effects of affective features of words during sentence or story comprehension. Here we were interested in how the different valences of words in a sentence influence its processing and supralexical affective evaluation. Using a sentence verification task we investigated how comprehension of simple declarative sentences containing a noun and an adjective depends on the valences of both words. The results are in line with the assumed general processing advantage for positive words. We also observed a clear interaction effect, as can be expected from the affective priming literature: sentences with emotionally congruent words (e.g., The grandpa is clever) were verified faster than sentences containing emotionally incongruent words (e.g., The grandpa is lonely). The priming effect was most prominent for sentences with positive words suggesting that both, early processing as well as later meaning integration and situation model construction, is modulated by affective processing. In a second rating task we investigated how the emotion potential of supralexical units depends on word valence. The simplest hypothesis predicts that the supralexical affective structure is a linear combination of the valences of the nouns and adjectives (Bestgen, 1994). Overall, our results do not support this: The observed clear interaction effect on ratings indicate that especially negative adjectives dominated supralexical evaluation, i.e., a sort of negativity bias in sentence evaluation. Future models of sentence processing thus should take interactive affective effects into account.

Highlights

In contrast to a comprehensive neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading (Jacobs, 2011, 2015a,b) most theories of word recognition and sentence processing disregard the role of affective content and emotional experiences
Studies on single word processing, which constitute the vast majority of research on affective text processing, have highlighted various processing differences for emotional compared to neutral words in various time windows following word (e.g., Kuchinke et al, 2005, 2007; Kissler et al, 2006, 2009; Herbert et al, 2008; Hofmann et al, 2009; Kousta et al, 2009; Schacht and Sommer, 2009; Scott et al, 2009; Palazova et al, 2011; Citron, 2012; Sheikh and Titone, 2013; Kuperman et al, 2014; Recio et al, 2014)
We presented simple declarative sentences with positive and negative nouns followed by either positive, neutral, or negative adjectives to test whether the processing of emotional words embedded in a sentence context is interactive

Summary

Introduction

In contrast to a comprehensive neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading (Jacobs, 2011, 2015a,b) most theories of word recognition and sentence processing disregard the role of affective content and emotional experiences. Despite differences in experimental designs and measures, “emotional” words are typically understood as words expressing emotions (e.g., sad, lonely, proud, jolly) or possessing “emotional connotations” (e.g., betrayer, nasty, family, successful). Such words are usually characterized within the framework of dimensional models of emotion along the two axes of arousal and valence. In most studies differences are more pronounced for positive compared to negative words (Kuchinke et al, 2005, 2007; Kanske and Kotz, 2007; Estes and Verges, 2008; Larsen et al, 2008; Hofmann et al, 2009; Schacht and Sommer, 2009; Scott et al, 2009; Palazova et al, 2011; Recio et al, 2014)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion