There has been no consensus on the neural dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words, which remains one of the major concerns in affective neurolinguistics. The current study adopted dot-probe tasks to investigate the valence effect on attentional bias toward Chinese emotion-label and emotion-laden words. Behavioral data showed that emotional word type and valence interacted in attentional bias scores with an attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words rather than positive emotion-label words and that this bias was derived from the disengagement difficulty in positive emotion-laden words. In addition, an attentional bias toward negative emotion-label words relative to positive emotion-label words was observed. The event-related potential (ERP) data demonstrated an interaction between emotional word type, valence, and hemisphere. A significant hemisphere effect was observed during the processing of positive emotion-laden word pairs rather than positive emotion-label, negative emotion-label, and negative emotion-laden word pairs, with positive emotion-laden word pairs eliciting an enhanced P1 in the right hemisphere as compared to the left hemisphere. Our results found a dynamic attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words; individuals allocated more attention to positive emotion-laden words in the early processing stage and had difficulty disengaging attention from them in the late processing stage.

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Emotion, as a classic topic in psychological studies, has been intensively investigated by scholars across disciplines. In discursive psychology, emotion discourse refers to the rich variety and situated uses of emotion words and metaphors. Many studies of emotion in discursive psychology focus on the rhetorical contrasts of emotion. Conceptual analysis is another significant part of emotion discourse, and one that requires further investigation. To reveal how people describe and evoke emotions in discourse, this article starts with a reinterpretation of emotion in discursive psychology, followed by setting up an emotion system from a systemic functional perspective to illustrate how conceptual analysis may be conducted and rhetorical contrasts explored. During the process of establishing the emotion system, the paper elaborates upon the emotion concept and rhetorical contrasts on the basis of four illustrative examples taken from authentic extracts (including news and testimonies). The paper discusses the purpose behind the construction of the emotion system in terms of (1) the constituents in conceptual analysis and rhetorical contrasts of discursive psychology from a functional perspective, (2) the collaboration between conceptual analysis and rhetorical contrasts, (3) the traits of the emotion system as a method of discursive psychology analysis.

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