Abstract
Emotional categorisation (deciding whether a word is emotional or not) is a task that employs the explicit analysis of the emotional meaning of words. Therefore, it allows for assessing the role of emotional factors, i.e., valence, arousal, and subjective significance, in emotional word processing. The aim of the current experiment was to investigate the role of subjective significance, a reflective form of activation that is similar to arousal (the automatic form), in the processing of emotional meaning. We applied the orthogonal manipulation of three emotional factors. Thus, we were able to precisely differentiate the effects of each factor and search for interactions between them. We expected valence to shape the late positive complex LPC component, while subjective significance and arousal were expected to shape the P300 and N400 components. We observed the effects of subjective significance throughout the whole span of processing, while the arousal effect was present only in the LPC component. We also observed that amplitudes for N400 and LPC discriminated negative from positive valence. The results showed that all factors included in the analysis should be taken into account while explaining the processing of emotion-laden words; especially interesting is the subjective significance, which was shown to shape processing individually, as well as to come into interaction with valence and arousal.
Subject
General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine,General Neuroscience
Reference89 articles.
1. The heat of the moment: the effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making;Ariely;Journal of Behavioral Decision Making,2006
2. A semantic atlas of emotional concepts;Averill;JSAS: Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology,1975
3. Discrete emotions or dimensions? The role of valence focus and arousal focus;Barrett;Cognition and Emotion,1998
4. The role of affective meaning, semantic associates, and orthographic neighbours in modulating the N400 in single words;Blomberg;The Mental Lexicon,2020
5. Affective norms for English words (ANEW): instruction manual and affective ratings;Bradley,1999
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献