Abstract
Many studies have found that the emotional content of words affects visual word recognition. However, most of them have only considered affective valence, finding inconsistencies regarding the direction of the effects, especially in unpleasant words. Recent studies suggest that arousal might explain why not all unpleasant words elicit the same behavior. The aim of the present research was to study the role of arousal in unpleasant word recognition. To do that, we carried out an ERP experiment in which participants performed a lexical decision task that included unpleasant words which could vary across three levels of arousal (intermediate, high, and very high) and words which were neutral in valence and had an intermediate level of arousal. Results showed that, within unpleasant words, those intermediate in arousal evoked smaller LPC amplitudes than words that were high or very high in arousal, indicating that arousal affects unpleasant word recognition. Critically, arousal determined whether the effect of negative valence was found or not. When arousal was not matched between unpleasant and neutral valenced words, the effect of emotionality was weak in the behavioral data and absent in the ERP data. However, when arousal was intermediate in both unpleasant and neutral valenced words, larger EPN amplitudes were reported for the former, pointing to an early allocation of attention. Interestingly, these unpleasant words which had an intermediate level of arousal showed a subsequent inhibitory effect in that they evoked smaller LPC amplitudes and led to slower reaction times and more errors than neutral words. Our results highlight the relevance that the arousal level has for the study of negative valence effects in word recognition.
Highlights
Certain stimuli appear to capture our attention more than others, and this salience is known to be determined by several factors, such as emotional content (Schacht and Sommer, 2009b)
We developed this study with the purpose to give an answer to the following questions: (1) Does arousal affect unpleasant word recognition? (2) Can arousal account for the inconsistencies regarding the negative valence effect? and (3) Does negative valence have an inhibitory or a facilitatory effect? To achieve these goals, we designed a lexical decision task (LDT) experiment in Spanish that included neutral words in valence with an intermediate level of arousal [e.g., sartén] and unpleasant words that varied in their degree of arousal [intermediate, high, and very high arousal; e.g., ceniza, temblor, and avalancha, respectively]
Planned comparisons showed that participants committed more errors when answering to in arousal (IU) words than to highly arousing words (HU) (p1 = 0.026; p2 = 0.098) and high in arousal (HHU) words (p1 = 0.023; p2 = 0.048), but no significant differences were found between HU and HHU words (p1 > 0.05; p2 > 0.05)
Summary
Certain stimuli appear to capture our attention more than others, and this salience is known to be determined by several factors, such as emotional content (Schacht and Sommer, 2009b). The arousal dimension refers to the activation associated to a given stimulus, ranging between relaxing or low arousing and activating or highly arousing These authors proposed a third dimension, dominance (that varies between under control and out of control), this dimension is not usually manipulated in experiments due to its lack of consistency and high dependence on both emotional valence and arousal (Redondo et al, 2007). Words neutral in valence tend to be intermediate in arousal This phenomenon leads to the typical boomerangshaped graph that systematically emerges when these variables are studied (e.g., Bradley and Lang, 1999; Redondo et al, 2007; Guasch et al, 2016). The relation between valence and arousal is stronger in unpleasant words than in pleasant ones (Kuperman et al, 2014; Guasch et al, 2016), as pleasant words tend to have more variability in their level of arousal
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