Can Masked Emotion-Laden Words Prime Emotion-Label Words? An ERP Test on the Mediated Account
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Wu C
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8576488 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, abstract concepts can be metaphorically associated with more concrete, physically embodied concepts, such as gustatory experience. Studies on taste-emotion metaphoric association reported that people associate love with sweet, jealousy with sour and bitter, and sadness with bitter. However, few studies have systematically examined the metaphoric association between taste and words referred to emotion (e.g., "sad") or emotion-laden concepts (e.g., "funeral"). In the current four studies (total N = 357), we examined this metaphoric association by having participants come up with a taste word when reading an emotion and emotion-laden word (Study 1-explicit association of taste words-to-emotion/emotion-laden words), come up with an emotion word when reading taste words (Study 2-explicit association of emotion words-to-taste words), rate the association between taste words and basic or non-basic emotion words (Study 3), and rate the association between taste words and a more expanded pool of emotion/emotion-laden words (Study 4). Results showed that sweet was mostly associated with positive emotion and emotion-laden words, whereas bitter, followed by sour and spicy, was mostly associated with negative emotion and emotion-laden words. The bidirectionality of taste-emotion metaphoric association was supported by our dataset. The implications of these findings on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and embodied cognition are discussed.
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Project description:Emotional valence is known to influence word processing dependent upon concreteness. Whereas some studies point towards stronger effects of emotion on concrete words, others claim amplified emotion effects for abstract words. We investigated the interaction of emotion and concreteness by means of fMRI and EEG in a delayed lexical decision task. Behavioral data revealed a facilitating effect of high positive and negative valence on the correct processing of abstract, but not concrete words. EEG data yielded a particularly low amplitude response of the late positive component (LPC) following concrete neutral words. This presumably indicates enhanced allocation of processing resources to abstract and emotional words at late stages of word comprehension. In fMRI, interactions between concreteness and emotion were observed within the semantic processing network: the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG). Higher positive or negative valence appears to facilitate semantic retrieval and selection of abstract words. Surprisingly, a reversal of this effect occurred for concrete words. This points towards enhanced semantic control for emotional concrete words compared to neutral concrete words. Our findings suggest fine-tuned integration of emotional valence and concreteness. Specifically, at late processing stages, semantic control mechanisms seem to integrate emotional cues depending on the previous progress of semantic retrieval.
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Project description:Emotional content is known to enhance memory in a content-dependent manner in healthy populations. In middle-aged and older adults, a reduced preference for negative material, or even an enhanced preference for positive material has been observed. This preference seems to be modulated by the emotional arousal that the material evokes. The neuroanatomical basis for emotional memory processes is, however, not well understood in middle-aged and older healthy people. Previous research on local gray matter correlates of emotional memory in older populations has mainly been conducted with patients suffering from various neurodegenerative diseases. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine regional gray matter correlates of immediate free recall and recognition memory of intentionally encoded positive, negative, and emotionally neutral words using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in a sample of 50-to-79-year-old cognitively intact normal adults. The behavioral analyses yielded a positivity bias in recognition memory, but not in immediate free recall. No associations with memory performance emerged from the region-of-interest (ROI) analyses using amygdalar and hippocampal volumes. Controlling for total intracranial volume, age, and gender, the whole-brain VBM analyses showed statistically significant associations between immediate free recall of negative words and volumes in various frontal regions, between immediate free recall of positive words and cerebellar volume, and between recognition memory of positive words and primary visual cortex volume. The findings indicate that the neural areas subserving memory for emotion-laden information encompass posterior brain areas, including the cerebellum, and that memory for emotion-laden information may be driven by cognitive control functions.
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Project description:This study investigates the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of emotional information processing during reading using a combination of surface and intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). Two different theoretical views were opposed. According to the standard psycholinguistic perspective, emotional responses to words are generated within the reading network itself subsequent to semantic activation. According to the neural re-use perspective, brain regions that are involved in processing emotional information contained in other stimuli (faces, pictures, smells) might be in charge of the processing of emotional information in words as well. We focused on a specific emotion-disgust-which has a clear locus in the brain, the anterior insula. Surface EEG showed differences between disgust and neutral words as early as 200 ms. Source localization suggested a cortical generator of the emotion effect in the left anterior insula. These findings were corroborated through the intracranial recordings of two epileptic patients with depth electrodes in insular and orbitofrontal areas. Both electrodes showed effects of disgust in reading as early as 200 ms. The early emotion effect in a brain region (insula) that responds to specific emotions in a variety of situations and stimuli clearly challenges classic sequential theories of reading in favor of the neural re-use perspective.
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Project description:The body-specificity hypothesis (BSH) predicts that right-handers and left-handers allocate positive and negative concepts differently on the horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side of their bodily space, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. Similar research shows that people, in general, tend to allocate positive and negative concepts in upper and lower areas, respectively, in relation to the vertical plane. Further research shows a higher salience of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the performance of sensorimotor tasks. The aim of the paper is to examine whether there should be a dominance of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane, not only at a sensorimotor level but also at a conceptual level. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the words "up", "down", "left", and "right". In Experiment 2, right-handed participants from two linguistic backgrounds were asked to allocate emotion words into a square grid divided into four boxes of equal areas. Results suggest that the vertical plane is more salient than the horizontal plane regarding the allocation of emotion words and positively-valenced words were placed in upper locations whereas negatively-valenced words were placed in lower locations. Together, the results lend support to the BSH while also suggesting a higher saliency of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the allocation of valenced words.
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Project description:Emotions important for survival and social interaction have received wide and deep investigations. The application of the fMRI technique into emotion processing has obtained overwhelming achievements with respect to the localization of emotion processes. The ERP method, which possesses highly temporal resolution compared to fMRI, can be employed to investigate the time course of emotion processing. The emotional modulation of the ERP component has been verified across numerous researches. Emotions, described as dynamically developing along with the growing age, have the possibility to be enhanced through learning (or training) or to be damaged due to disturbances in growth, which is underlain by the neural plasticity of emotion-relevant nervous systems. And mood disorders with typical symptoms of emotion discordance probably have been caused by the dysfunctional neural plasticity.
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Project description:Humans have an almost unbounded ability to adapt their behaviour to perform different tasks. In the laboratory, this flexibility is sometimes viewed as a nuisance factor that prevents access to the underlying cognitive mechanisms of interest. For example, in order to study "automatic" lexical processing, psycholinguists have used masked priming or evoked potentials. However, the pattern of masked priming can be radically altered by changing the task. In lexical decision, priming is observed for words but not for nonwords, yet in a same-different matching task, priming is observed for same responses but not for different responses, regardless of whether the target is a word or a nonword [Norris & Kinoshita, 2008. Perception as evidence accumulation and Bayesian inference: Insights from masked priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(3), 434-55. doi:10.1037/a0012799]. Here we show that evoked potentials are equally sensitive to the nature of required decision, with the neural activity normally associated with lexical processing being seen for both words and nonwords on same trials, and for neither on different trials.
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Project description:We distinguish two evaluative systems which evoke automatic and reflective emotions. Automatic emotions are direct reactions to stimuli whereas reflective emotions are always based on verbalized (and often abstract) criteria of evaluation. We conducted an electroencephalography (EEG) study in which 25 women were required to read and respond to emotional words which engaged either the automatic or reflective system. Stimulus words were emotional (positive or negative) and neutral. We found an effect of valence on an early response with dipolar fronto-occipital topography; positive words evoked a higher amplitude response than negative words. We also found that topographically specific differences in the amplitude of the late positive complex were related to the system involved in processing. Emotional stimuli engaging the automatic system were associated with significantly higher amplitudes in the left-parietal region; the response to neutral words was similar regardless of the system engaged. A different pattern of effects was observed in the central region, neutral stimuli engaging the reflective system evoked a higher amplitudes response whereas there was no system effect for emotional stimuli. These differences could not be reduced to effects of differences between the arousing properties and concreteness of the words used as stimuli.
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Project description:The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed only if no satisfactory interpretation is reached. In contrast, the direct access approach argues that figurative aspects can be accessed immediately. We presented metaphors (These lawyers are hyenas, Experiment 1a and 1b) and producer-for-product metonymies (The boy read Böll, Experiment 2a and 2b) with and without a prime word that was semantically relevant to the literal meaning of the target word (furry and talented, respectively). In the presentation without priming, metaphors revealed a biphasic N400-Late Positivity pattern, while metonymies showed an N400 only. We interpret the findings within a two-phase language architecture where contextual expectations guide initial access (N400) and precede pragmatic adjustment resulting in reconceptualization (Late Positivity). With masked priming, the N400-difference was reduced for metaphors and vanished for metonymies. This speaks against the direct access view that predicts a facilitating effect for the literal condition only and hence would predict the N400-difference to increase. The results are more consistent with indirect access accounts that argue for facilitation effects for both conditions and consequently for consistent or even smaller N400-amplitude differences. This combined masked priming ERP paradigm therefore yields new insights into the role of literal meaning in the online composition of figurative language.
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