Temporospatial analysis of explicit and implicit processing of negative content during word comprehension

The bright side of words: Norms for 9000 Spanish words in seven discrete positive emotions

In recent years, assumptions about the existence of a single construct of happiness that accounts for all positive emotions have been questioned. Instead, several discrete positive emotions with their own neurobiological and psychological mechanisms have been proposed. Of note, the effects of positive emotions on language processing are not yet properly understood. Here we provide a database for a large set of 9000 Spanish words scored by 3437 participants in the positive emotions of awe, contentment, amusement, excitement, serenity, relief, and pleasure. We also report significant correlations between discrete positive emotions and several affective (e.g., valence, arousal, happiness, negative discrete emotions) and lexico-semantic (e.g., frequency of use, familiarity, concreteness, age of acquisition) characteristics of words. Finally, we analyze differences between words conveying a single emotion ("pure" emotion words) and those denoting more than one emotion ("mixed" emotion words). This study will provide researchers a rich source of information to do research that contributes to expanding the current knowledge on the role of positive emotions in language. The norms are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21533571.v2.

CROWD-5e: A Croatian psycholinguistic database of affective norms for five discrete emotions

The present study introduces affective norms for a set of 3022 Croatian words on five discrete emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. The words were rated by 1239 Croatian native speakers. Each participant rated 251 or 252 words for one discrete emotion on a five-point Likert scale. The analyses revealed a significant relationship between discrete emotions, emotional dimensions (valence and arousal), and other psycholinguistic properties of words. In addition, small sex differences in discrete emotion ratings were found. Finally, the analysis of the distribution of words among discrete emotions allowed a distinction between "pure" words (i.e., those mostly related to a single emotion) and "mixed" words (i.e., those related to more than one emotion). The new database extends the existing Croatian affective norms collected from a dimensional conception of emotions, providing the necessary resource for future experimental investigation in Croatian within the theoretical framework of discrete emotions.

Dissociating different temporal stages of emotional word processing by feature-based attention

Negative emotional content is prioritized across different stages of information processing as reflected by different components of the event-related potential (ERP). In this preregistered study (N = 40), we investigated how varying the attentional focus allows us to dissociate the involvement of specific ERP components in the processing of negative and neutral words. Participants had to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto the words, the word type (adjective/noun), or the emotional content (negative/neutral). Thus, attention was either not focused on words (distraction task), non-emotional aspects, or the emotional relevance of words. Regardless of the task, there were no significant differences between negative and neutral words for the P1, N1, or P2 components. In contrast, interactions between emotion and task were observed for the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). EPN differences were absent during the distraction task but were present in the other two tasks. LPP emotion differences were found only when attention was directed to the emotional content of words. Our study adds to the evidence that early ERP components do not reliably separate negative and neutral words. However, results show that mid-latency and late stages of emotion processing are separable by different attention tasks. The EPN represents a stage of attentional enhancement of negative words given sufficient attentional resources. Differential activations during the LPP stage are associated with more elaborative processing of the emotional meaning of words.

The influence of word concreteness on acquired positive emotion association: An event-related potential study

The ability to acquire positive emotions from words is essential to psychological well-being. How word concreteness affects the process of positive emotion acquisition remains unknown. Here, using an evaluation conditioning paradigm, participants learned the association between pseudowords and concrete/abstract and positive/neutral words. Behavior and event-related potential data were recorded while participants performed emotional recognition tasks. Behavioral results showed that, for neutral words, concrete words were more accurate than abstract words, whereas for positive words, abstract words were more accurate than concrete words. Moreover, N1 and P2 amplitudes in the pseudowords were modulated by interacting word emotion and concreteness. Specifically, pseudowords associated with neutral concrete words elicited larger N1 and P2 amplitudes than pseudowords associated with neutral abstract words. Conversely, N1 and P2 amplitudes in pseudowords associated with positive abstract words were not significant compared to those in positive concrete words. Additionally, an emotional effect was observed when pseudowords were associated with abstract words, showing higher P3 amplitude for the pseudowords associated with positive abstract words than neutral abstract words. No significant effects were found for the pseudowords associated with positive abstract or concrete words. These findings suggest that association learning may influence the early attention processing of emotion acquisition from words, and emotional information of positive abstract words might boost positive emotion acquisition, thereby eliminating the acquisition advantage from positive concrete words.

Attentional biases toward auditory weight-related information among females with weight dissatisfaction

Although there is substantial evidence of visual attentional biases in processing weight-related information among individuals with weight dissatisfaction, few studies have examined auditory attentional biases in these individuals. The identification of attentional biases may provide an impetus for interventions to reduce distress, negative body image, and pathological eating patterns among weight-dissatisfied individuals. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the attentional biases, as well as the neural consequences, toward auditory weight-related information among weight-dissatisfied young females. In this experiment, young female participants were assigned to an experimental group with high weight dissatisfaction (HWD) and a control group with low weight dissatisfaction (LWD) according to the levels of weight dissatisfaction. Using a spatial cueing paradigm, auditory fatness-related, thinness-related, and neutral household words were presented laterally as cue stimuli, followed by visual stimuli presented at either the cued or uncued location. The results revealed that auditory fatness-related words elicited significantly larger N2ac amplitudes than auditory thinness-related and neutral words in the HWD group. However, for the LWD group, thinness-related words elicited a significantly larger N2ac than fatness-related and neutral words. These results suggest an orienting attentional bias toward auditory fatness-related body words among females with HWD and an orienting attentional bias toward auditory thinness-related words among females with LWD.

Neural correlates of understanding emotional words in late childhood

Prior studies involving adults have shown that words can elicit emotional processing, with emotion-label (e.g., happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., gift) having distinct processes. However, limited studies have explored the developmental changes in these processes in relation to emotional valence. To address this question, this exploratory study measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in 11-14-year-old children/adolescents (N = 25) and adults (N = 23) while performing an emotional categorization task. The stimuli used were two-character Chinese words, with factors for word type (emotion-label versus emotion-laden) and valence (positive versus negative). To confirm word emotionality, neutral words were also included and compared with all emotional words. The results showed that adults exhibited reduced N400 amplitudes to emotion-label words compared to emotion-laden ones in both positive and negative valence contexts. The differentiation was only sustained for negative valence in the late positive component (LPC). Similar scalp distributions of the effects of word type were found in children/adolescents; however, they exhibited a more prolonged processing of all emotional words than adults. These results suggest that the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words are distinct in late childhood, and this discrepancy varies with emotional valence and increasing age.

Attention to affect 2.0: Multiple effects of emotion and attention on event-related potentials of visual word processing in a valence-detection task

Here we continue recent work on the specific mental processes engaged in a valence-detection task. Fifty-seven participants responded to one predefined target level of valence (negative, neutral, or positive), and ignored the remaining two levels. This enables more precise fine-tuning of neuronal pathways, compared to valence categorization where attention is divided between different levels of valence. Our group recently used valence detection with emotional words. Posterior P1 and N170 effects in the event-related potential (ERP) supported the idea of valent word forms that can be tuned by selective attention to valence. Here we report findings on three distinct posterior N2 components, P300, N400, and the late positive potential (LPP). Target but not nontarget words showed an arousal effect (emotional > neutral) on left-side early posterior negativity (180-280 ms). In contrast, an arousal effect on a sharp N2 deflection in left-minus-right difference ERPs (230-270 ms), suggesting facilitation of lexical access for emotional words, was independent of target status. This also applied to increased medial parieto-occipital N2 (260-300 ms) specific to negative words, indicating attentional capture. Medial-central N400 was specifically enhanced for negative nontarget words, further supporting attentional capture. The typical LPP arousal effect was observed, being stronger and more left-lateralized in target words. An exploratory finding concerned a broad component-overarching ERP valence effect (250-650 ms). Independent of target status, ERPs were more positive for positive than negative words. Combined with our previous results, data suggest multiple loci of emotion-attention interactions in valence detection.

Gamma Oscillations in the Temporal Pole Reflect the Contribution of Approach and Avoidance Motivational Systems to the Processing of Fear and Anger Words

Prior reports suggest that affective effects in visual word processing cannot be fully explained by a dimensional perspective of emotions based on valence and arousal. In the current study, we focused on the contribution of approach and avoidance motivational systems that are related to different action components to the processing of emotional words. To this aim, we compared frontal alpha asymmetries and brain oscillations elicited by anger words associated with approach (fighting) motivational tendencies, and fear words that may trigger either avoidance (escaping), approach (fighting) or no (freezing) action tendencies. The participants’ task was to make decisions about approaching or distancing from the concepts represented by words. The results of cluster-based and beamforming analyses revealed increased gamma power band synchronization for fear words relative to anger words between 725 and 750 ms, with an estimated neural origin in the temporal pole. These findings were interpreted to reflect a conflict between different action tendencies underlying the representation of fear words in semantic and emotional memories, when trying to achieve task requirements. These results are in line with the predictions made by the fear-hinders-action hypothesis. Additionally, current data highlights the contribution of motivational features to the representation and processing of emotional words.

Mexican Emotional Speech Database Based on Semantic, Frequency, Familiarity, Concreteness, and Cultural Shaping of Affective Prosody

In this paper, the Mexican Emotional Speech Database (MESD) that contains single-word emotional utterances for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral and sadness with adult (male and female) and child voices is described. To validate the emotional prosody of the uttered words, a cubic Support Vector Machines classifier was trained on the basis of prosodic, spectral and voice quality features for each case study: (1) male adult, (2) female adult and (3) child. In addition, cultural, semantic, and linguistic shaping of emotional expression was assessed by statistical analysis. This study was registered at BioMed Central and is part of the implementation of a published study protocol. Mean emotional classification accuracies yielded 93.3%, 89.4% and 83.3% for male, female and child utterances respectively. Statistical analysis emphasized the shaping of emotional prosodies by semantic and linguistic features. A cultural variation in emotional expression was highlighted by comparing the MESD with the INTERFACE for Castilian Spanish database. The MESD provides reliable content for linguistic emotional prosody shaped by the Mexican cultural environment. In order to facilitate further investigations, a corpus controlled for linguistic features and emotional semantics, as well as one containing words repeated across voices and emotions are provided. The MESD is made freely available.

EmoPro - Emotional prototypicality for 1286 Spanish words: Relationships with affective and psycholinguistic variables

We present EmoPro, a normative study of the emotion lexicon of the Spanish language. We provide emotional prototypicality ratings for 1286 emotion words (i.e., those that refer to human emotions such as "fear" or "happy"), belonging to different grammatical categories. This is the largest data set for this variable so far. Each word was rated by at least 20 participants, and adequate reliability and validity rates for prototypicality scores were found. We also provide new affective (valence, arousal, emotionality, happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger) and psycholinguistic (Age-of-Acquisition, frequency and concreteness) ratings for those words without prior data in the extant literature, and analyze which of the given variables contribute the most to prototypicality. A factor analysis on the affective and psycholinguistic variables has shown that prototypicality loads in a factor associated to the emotional salience of words. Furthermore, a regression analysis reveals a significant role of both dimensional and discrete- emotion-related variables, as well as a modest effect of AoA and frequency on the prediction of prototypicality. Cross-linguistic comparisons show that the pattern obtained here is similar to that observed in other languages. EmoPro norms will be highly valuable for researchers in the field, providing them with a tool to select the most representative emotion words in Spanish for their experimental (e.g., for a comparison with emotion-laden words, such as "murder" or "party") or applied studies (e.g., to examine the acquisition of emotion words/concepts in children). The full set of norms is available as supplementary material.

Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

Socio-emotional impairments are key symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders. This work proposes to analyze the neuronal activity related to the discrimination of emotional prosodies in autistic children (aged 9 to 11-year-old) as follows. Firstly, a database for single words uttered in Mexican Spanish by males, females, and children will be created. Then, optimal acoustic features for emotion characterization will be extracted, followed of a cubic kernel function Support Vector Machine (SVM) in order to validate the speech corpus. As a result, human-specific acoustic properties of emotional voice signals will be identified. Secondly, those identified acoustic properties will be modified to synthesize the recorded human emotional voices. Thirdly, both human and synthesized utterances will be used to study the electroencephalographic correlate of affective prosody processing in typically developed and autistic children. Finally, and on the basis of the outcomes, synthesized voice-enhanced environments will be created to develop an intervention based on social-robot and Social Story^TM for autistic children to improve affective prosodies discrimination. This protocol has been registered at BioMed Central under the following number: ISRCTN18117434.

The mental representation and social aspect of expressives

Despite increased focus on emotional language, research lacks for the most emotional language: Swearing. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether swear words have content distinct from function words, and if so, whether this content is emotional or social in nature. Stimuli included swear (e.g. shit, damn), negative but non-swear (e.g. kill, sick), open-class neutral (e.g. wood, lend), and closed-class neutral words (e.g. while, whom). Behaviourally, swears were recognised slower than valence- and arousal- matched negative words, meaning that there is more to the expressive dimension than merely a heightened emotional state. In ERPs, both swears and negative words elicited a larger positivity (250-550 ms) than open-class neutral words. Later, swears elicited a larger late positivity (550-750 ms) than negative words. We associate the earlier positivity effect with attention due to negative valence, and the later positivity effect with pragmatics due to social tabooness. Our findings suggest a view in which expressives are not merely function words or emotional words. Rather, expressives are emotionally and socially significant. Swears are more than what is indicated by valence ore arousal alone.

Attending to Eliza: rapid brain responses reflect competence attribution in virtual social feedback processing

In the age of virtual communication, the source of a message is often inferred rather than perceived, raising the question of how sender attributions affect content processing. We investigated this issue in an evaluative feedback scenario. Participants were told that an expert psychotherapist, a layperson or a randomly acting computer was going to give them online positive, neutral or negative personality feedback while high-density EEG was recorded. Sender attribution affected processing rapidly, even though the feedback was on average identical. Event-related potentials revealed a linear increase with attributed expertise beginning 150 ms after disclosure and most pronounced for N1, P2 and early posterior negativity components. P3 and late positive potential amplitudes were increased for both human senders and for emotionally significant (positive or negative) feedback. Strikingly, feedback from a putative expert prompted large P3 responses, even for inherently neutral content. Source analysis localized early enhancements due to attributed sender expertise in frontal and somatosensory regions and later responses in the posterior cingulate and extended visual and parietal areas, supporting involvement of mentalizing, embodied processing and socially motivated attention. These findings reveal how attributed sender expertise rapidly alters feedback processing in virtual interaction and have implications for virtual therapy and online communication.

Does it matter if we approach or withdraw when reading? A comparison of fear-related words and anger-related words

The main aim of the present research was to explore the role of affective features beyond valence and arousal (i.e., the approach-withdrawal dimension) in visual word processing. For this purpose, fear-related words and anger-related words were compared in three tasks: a lexical decision task (LDT), a valence decision task (VDT) and an approach-distancing decision task (ADDT). Although these two types of words did not differ in the first two tasks, faster 'distancing' responses were given to anger-related words than to fear-related words in the ADDT. As long as these two types of words were matched in valence and arousal (among other variables), these results illustrate the need to consider other emotional dimensions (in this case, the approach-withdrawal dimension) beyond the two-dimensional perspective in order to account for the emotional effects in visual words processing and to describe how the affective space is organized. In addition, the results suggest a task-dependence effect: differential effects of fear and anger only emerged when participants were explicitly focused on the approach-withdrawal dimension. These findings are discussed in relation to motivationally-based mechanisms.

Effects of valence and arousal on affective priming vary with the degree of affective experience denoted by words

We investigated whether the effect of the valence and arousal of less or more affective experiential words on affective priming using event-related potentials (ERPs). The stimuli included less affective experiential (LE) words (Experiment 1) and more affective experiential (ME) words (Experiment 2) that were organized in an orthogonal design, with valence (positive and negative) and arousal (low and high) as factors in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the results revealed no obvious effect of affective priming on response times (RTs) or ERPs for LE words. In Experiment 2, affective priming effects of ME words were influenced interactively by valence and arousal. Specifically, for positive ME words with high- and low-arousal, affectively incongruent trials were associated with longer RTs and enhanced late positive components (LPCs, 430-700 ms) compared with congruent trials (a positive effect). For negative ME words with low-arousal, no significant differences in RTs or LPC amplitudes were found between affectively congruent and incongruent trials (a null effect), whereas for negative ME words with high-arousal, the processing of congruent trials was associated with longer RTs and enhanced LPC amplitudes over that of incongruent trials (a reversal effect). On the one hand, our findings suggest that LE and ME words as primes produce different effects on the processing of subsequently presented targets. On the other hand, our findings further indicate that there seems to have a continuous transition from the spreading activation of ME words to an inhibition process in semantic memory along with their valence and arousal, which is involved in decision-making processes and memory-related stages.

Time course of emotion effects during emotion-label and emotion-laden word processing

Previous studies have investigated the time course of emotion effects during emotion-word processing, but no consistent pattern has emerged. Notably, most of these studies intermixed emotion-label words (e.g., "happy") with emotion-laden words (e.g., "successful"), although emotion activation differences for these two types of words have been documented. Here, we separately investigated the time course of the emotion effects of emotion-label and emotion-laden words with a lexical decision task. The results showed that emotion-label words and negative emotion-laden words elicited a larger P2 than did neutral words, whereas there was no difference in P2 between positive emotion-laden and neutral words. Furthermore, both emotion-label and emotion-laden words, regardless of their valence, elicited smaller N400 components than did neutral words. These results suggest that the emotion effect of emotion-label words occurs earlier than that of emotion-laden words, but this difference is limited to the positive valence category.

Hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion to ignore pre-cues decreases space-valence congruency effects in highly hypnotizable individuals

Previous studies have shown that the speed of identifying emotional words is affected by pre-cues of up or down arrows, called the space-valence congruency effect (Zhang, Hu, Zhang, & Wang, 2015). In the present study, we investigate whether this effect is influenced by hypnotic or non-hypnotic suggestions to ignore pre-cues in highly hypnotizable individuals (HHIs). In all conditions, target words (including positive words, negative words and neutral words) primed by up or down arrows were presented to pre-screened HHIs. They were asked to identify whether the target words had emotional valence. Behavioral results showed that the space-valence congruency effect was absent in the hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion groups, but present in the non-suggestion control group. Consistently, the amplitudes of P2 components elicited by negative words were significantly larger when primed by down than by up arrows in the non-suggestion control group, and this P2 effect was absent in the hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion groups. Moreover, the amplitudes of the late positive components (LPC) showed no significant arrow-priming difference for positive targets in the hypnotic-suggestion and control groups. However, in the non-hypnotic suggestion group, the amplitudes of LPC were significantly larger when primed by down than up arrows for positive targets. Our results showed that suggestions, even without a hypnotic induction, can de-automatize embodied emotional recognition processes and modulate early attentional processing.

Recognition memory advantage for negative emotional words has an early expiry date: Evidence from brain oscillations and ERPs

Evidence from prior studies has shown an advantage in recognition memory for emotional compared to neutral words. Whether this advantage is short-lived or rather extends over longer periods, as well as whether the effect depends on words' valence (i.e., positive or negative), remains unknown. In the present ERP/EEG study, we investigated this issue by manipulating the lag distance (LAG-2, LAG-8 and LAG-16) between the presentation of old and new words in an online recognition memory task. LAG differences were observed at behavior, ERPs and in the theta frequency band. In line with previous studies, negative words were associated with faster reaction times, higher hit rates and increased amplitude in a positive ERP component between 386 and 564 ms compared to positive and neutral words. Remarkably, the interaction of LAG by EMOTION revealed that negative words were associated with better performance and larger ERPs amplitudes only at LAG-2. Also in the LAG-2 condition, emotional words (i.e., positive and negative words) induced a stronger desynchronization in the beta band between 386 and 542 ms compared to neutral words. These early enhanced memory effects for emotional words are discussed in terms of the Negative Emotional Valence Enhances Recapitulation (NEVER) model and the mobilization-minimization hypothesis.

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories

The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approach is much lower. There is a need to fill this gap, considering that discrete emotions have an effect on word processing above and beyond those of valence and arousal. In the present study, we present ratings from 1,380 participants for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. This will be the largest dataset published to date containing ratings for discrete emotions. We also present, for the first time, a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of words into the five emotion categories. This analysis reveals that happiness words are the most consistently related to a single, discrete emotion category. In contrast, there is a tendency for many negative words to belong to more than one discrete emotion. The only exception is disgust words, which overlap least with the other negative emotions. Normative valence and arousal data already exist for all of the words included in this corpus. Thus, the present database will allow researchers to design studies to contrast the predictions of the two most influential theoretical perspectives in this field. These studies will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of emotion on word processing.

Sex differences in the development of emotion circuitry in adolescents at risk for substance abuse: a longitudinal fMRI study

There is substantial evidence for behavioral sex differences in risk trajectories for alcohol and substance use, with internalizing factors such as negative affectivity contributing more to female risk. Because the neural development of emotion circuitry varies between males and females across adolescence, it represents a potential mechanism by which underlying neurobiology contributes to risk for substance use. Longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted in males and females (n = 18 each) with a family history of alcohol use disorders starting at ages 8-13 years. Participants performed an affective word task during functional magnetic resonance imaging at 1- to 2-year intervals, covering the age range of 8.5-17.6 years (3-4 scans per participant). Significant age-related sex differences were found in the right amygdala and right precentral gyrus for the negative vs neutral word condition. Males showed a significant decrease in both amygdala and precentral gyrus activation with age, whereas the response in females persisted. The subjective experience of internalizing symptomatology significantly increased with age for females but not for males. Taken together, these results reveal sex differences in negative affect processing in at-risk adolescents, and offer longitudinal neural evidence for female substance use risk through internalizing pathways.

Affective norms of 875 Spanish words for five discrete emotional categories and two emotional dimensions

In the present study, we introduce affective norms for a new set of Spanish words, the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS), that were scored on two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and on five discrete emotional categories (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust), as well as on concreteness, by 660 Spanish native speakers. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic variables--grammatical class, word frequency, number of letters, and number of syllables--for the words are also included. We observed high split-half reliabilities for every emotional variable and a strong quadratic relationship between valence and arousal. Additional analyses revealed several associations between the affective dimensions and discrete emotions, as well as with some psycholinguistic variables. This new corpus complements and extends prior databases in Spanish and allows for designing new experiments investigating the influence of affective content in language processing under both dimensional and discrete theoretical conceptions of emotion. These norms can be downloaded as supplemental materials for this article from www.dropbox.com/s/o6dpw3irk6utfhy/Hinojosa%20et%20al_Supplementary%20materials.xlsx?dl=0 .

Effects of valence and arousal on emotional word processing are modulated by concreteness: Behavioral and ERP evidence from a lexical decision task

We investigated whether the effects of valence and arousal on emotional word processing are modulated by concreteness using event-related potentials (ERPs). The stimuli included concrete words (Experiment 1) and abstract words (Experiment 2) that were organized in an orthogonal design, with valence (positive and negative) and arousal (low and high) as factors in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the impact of emotion on the effects of concrete words mainly resulted from the contribution of valence. Positive concrete words were processed more quickly than negative words and elicited a reduction of N400 (300-410ms) and enhancement of late positive complex (LPC; 450-750ms), whereas no differences in response times or ERPs were found between high and low levels of arousal. In Experiment 2, the interaction between valence and arousal influenced the impact of emotion on the effects of abstract words. Low-arousal positive words were associated with shorter response times and a reduction of LPC amplitudes compared with high-arousal positive words. Low-arousal negative words were processed more slowly and elicited a reduction of N170 (140-200ms) compared with high-arousal negative words. The present study indicates that word concreteness modulates the contributions of valence and arousal to the effects of emotion, and this modulation occurs during the early perceptual processing stage (N170) and late elaborate processing stage (LPC) for emotional words and at the end of all cognitive processes (i.e., reflected by response times). These findings support an embodied theory of semantic representation and help clarify prior inconsistent findings regarding the ways in which valance and arousal influence different stages of word processing, at least in a lexical decision task.

The role of the supplementary motor area for speech and language processing

Apart from its function in speech motor control, the supplementary motor area (SMA) has largely been neglected in models of speech and language processing in the brain. The aim of this review paper is to summarize more recent work, suggesting that the SMA has various superordinate control functions during speech communication and language reception, which is particularly relevant in case of increased task demands. The SMA is subdivided into a posterior region serving predominantly motor-related functions (SMA proper) whereas the anterior part (pre-SMA) is involved in higher-order cognitive control mechanisms. In analogy to motor triggering functions of the SMA proper, the pre-SMA seems to manage procedural aspects of cognitive processing. These latter functions, among others, comprise attentional switching, ambiguity resolution, context integration, and coordination between procedural and declarative memory structures. Regarding language processing, this refers, for example, to the use of inner speech mechanisms during language encoding, but also to lexical disambiguation, syntax and prosody integration, and context-tracking.

The Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS): Ratings of Dominance, Familiarity, Subjective Age of Acquisition and Sensory Experience

The current study presents ratings by 540 Spanish native speakers for dominance, familiarity, subjective age of acquisition (AoA), and sensory experience (SER) for the 875 Spanish words included in the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary materials for this manuscript from https://figshare.com/s/8e7b445b729527262c88 These ratings may be of potential relevance to researches who are interested in characterizing the interplay between language and emotion. Additionally, with the aim of investigating how the affective features interact with the lexicosemantic properties of words, we performed correlational analyses between norms for familiarity, subjective AoA and SER, and scores for those affective variables which are currently included in the MADs. A distinct pattern of significant correlations with affective features was found for different lexicosemantic variables. These results show that familiarity, subjective AoA and SERs may have independent effects on the processing of emotional words. They also suggest that these psycholinguistic variables should be fully considered when formulating theoretical approaches to the processing of affective language.

The temporal primacy of self-related stimuli and negative stimuli: an ERP-based comparative study

Numerous studies have shown there exist attention biases for self-related and negative stimuli. Few studies, however, have been carried out to compare the effects of such stimuli on the neural mechanisms of early attentional alertness and subsequent cognitive processing. The purpose of the present study was to examine the temporal primacy of both self-related stimuli and negative stimuli in the neurophysiologic level. In a modified oddball task, event-related potentials of the deviant stimuli (i.e., self-face, negative face and neutral face) were recorded. Results revealed that larger P2 amplitudes were elicited by self-related and negative stimuli than by neutral stimuli. Negative stimuli, however, elicited shorter P2 latencies than self-related and neutral stimuli. As for the N2 component, self-related and negative stimuli elicited smaller amplitudes and shorter latencies than neutral stimuli, but otherwise did not differ. Self-related stimuli also elicited larger P3 and late positive component (LPC) amplitudes than negative and neutral stimuli. The pattern of results suggests that the primacy of negative stimuli occurred at an early attention stage of processing, while the primacy of self-related stimuli occurred at the subsequent cognitive evaluation and memory stage.

The relation between schizotypy and early attention to rejecting interactions: The influence of neuroticism

OBJECTIVES

Schizotypy relates to rejection sensitivity (anxiety reflecting an expectancy of social exclusion) and neuroticism (excessive evaluation of negative emotions). Positive schizotypy (e.g., perceptual aberrations and odd beliefs) and negative schizotypy (e.g., social and physical anhedonia) could relate to altered attention to rejection because of neuroticism.

METHODS

Forty-one healthy individuals were assessed on positive and negative schizotypy and neuroticism, and event-related potentials during rejecting, accepting and neutral scenes. Participants were categorised into high, moderate and low neuroticism groups. Using temporo-spatial principal components analyses, P200 (peak latency = 290 ms) and P300 amplitudes (peak latency = 390 ms) were measured, reflecting mobilisation of attention and early attention, respectively.

RESULTS

Scalp-level and cortical source analysis revealed elevated fronto-parietal N300/P300 amplitude and P200-related dorsal anterior cingulate current density during rejection than acceptance/neutral scenes. Positive schizotypy related inversely to parietal P200 amplitude during rejection. Negative schizotypy related positively to P200 middle occipital current density. Negative schizotypy related positively to parietal P300, where the association was stronger in high and moderate, than low, neuroticism groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Positive and negative schizotypy relate divergently to attention to rejection. Positive schizotypy attenuates, but negative schizotypy increases rejection-related mobilisation of attention. Negative schizotypy increases early attention to rejection partly due to elevated neuroticism.

Effects of negative content on the processing of gender information: an event-related potential study

Previous research on emotion in language has mainly concerned the impact of emotional information on several aspects of lexico-semantic analyses of single words. However, affective influences on morphosyntactic processing are less understood. In the present study, we focused on the impact of negative valence in the processing of gender agreement relations. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read three-word phrases and performed a syntactic judgment task. Negative and neutral adjectives could agree or disagree in gender with the preceding noun. At an electrophysiological level, the amplitude of a left anterior negativity (LAN) to gender agreement mismatches decreased in negative words, relative to neutral words. The behavioral data suggested that LAN amplitudes might be indexing the processing costs associated with the detection of gender agreement errors, since the detection of gender mismatches resulted in faster and more accurate responses than did the detection of correct gender agreement relations. According to this view, it seems that negative content facilitated the processes implicated in the early detection of gender agreement mismatches. However, gender agreement violations in negative words triggered processes involved in the reanalysis and repair of the syntactic structure, as reflected in larger P600 amplitudes to incorrect than to correct phrases, irrespective of their emotional valence.

The way you say it, the way I feel it: emotional word processing in accented speech

The present study examined whether processing words with affective connotations in a listener's native language may be modulated by accented speech. To address this question, we used the Event Related Potential (ERP) technique and recorded the cerebral activity of Spanish native listeners, who performed a semantic categorization task, while listening to positive, negative and neutral words produced in standard Spanish or in four foreign accents. The behavioral results yielded longer latencies for emotional than for neutral words in both native and foreign-accented speech, with no difference between positive and negative words. The electrophysiological results replicated previous findings from the emotional language literature, with the amplitude of the Late Positive Complex (LPC), associated with emotional language processing, being larger (more positive) for emotional than for neutral words at posterior scalp sites. Interestingly, foreign-accented speech was found to interfere with the processing of positive valence and go along with a negativity bias, possibly suggesting heightened attention to negative words. The manipulation employed in the present study provides an interesting perspective on the effects of accented speech on processing affective-laden information. It shows that higher order semantic processes that involve emotion-related aspects are sensitive to a speaker's accent.

Neural correlates of an early attentional capture by positive distractor words

Exogenous or automatic attention to emotional distractors has been observed for emotional scenes and faces. In the language domain, however, automatic attention capture by emotional words has been scarcely investigated. In the current event-related potentials study we explored distractor effects elicited by positive, negative and neutral words in a concurrent but distinct target distractor paradigm. Specifically, participants performed a digit categorization task in which task-irrelevant words were flanked by numbers. The results of both temporo-spatial principal component and source location analyses revealed the existence of early distractor effects that were specifically triggered by positive words. At the scalp level, task-irrelevant positive compared to neutral and negative words elicited larger amplitudes in an anterior negative component that peaked around 120 ms. Also, at the voxel level, positive distractor words increased activity in orbitofrontal regions compared to negative words. These results suggest that positive distractor words quickly and automatically capture attentional resources diverting them from the task where attention was voluntarily directed.