The study presented here provides researchers with a revised list of affective German words, the Berlin Affective Word List Reloaded (BAWL-R). This work is an extension of the previously published BAWL , which has enabled researchers to investigate affective word processing with highly controlled stimulus material. The lack of arousal ratings, however, necessitated a revised version of the BAWL. We therefore present the BAWL-R, which is the first list that not only contains a large set of psycholinguistic indexes known to influence word processing, but also features ratings regarding emotional arousal, in addition to emotional valence and imageability. The BAWL-R is intended to help researchers create stimulus material for a wide range of experiments dealing with the affective processing of German verbal material.

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Effects of frequency, predictability, and position of words on event-related potentials were assessed during word-by-word sentence reading in 48 subjects in an early and in a late time window corresponding to P200 and N400. Repeated-measures multiple regression analyses revealed a P200-effect in the high-frequency range; also the P200 was larger on words at the beginning and end of sentences than on words in the middle of sentences (i.e., a quadratic effect of word position). Predictability strongly affected the N400 component; the effect was stronger for low than for high-frequency words. The P200 frequency effect indicates that high-frequency words are lexically accessed very fast, independent of context information. Effects on the N400 suggest that predictability strongly moderates the late access especially of low-frequency words. Thus, contextual facilitation on the N400 appears to reflect both lexical and post-lexical stages of word recognition, questioning a strict classification into lexical and post-lexical processes.

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The study presented here investigated the effects of emotional valence on the memory for words by assessing both memory performance and pupillary responses during a recognition memory task. Participants had to make speeded judgments on whether a word presented in the test phase of the experiment had already been presented ("old") or not ("new"). An emotion-induced recognition bias was observed: Words with emotional content not only produced a higher amount of hits, but also elicited more false alarms than neutral words. Further, we found a distinct pupil old/new effect characterized as an elevated pupillary response to hits as opposed to correct rejections. Interestingly, this pupil old/new effect was clearly diminished for emotional words. We therefore argue that the pupil old/new effect is not only able to mirror memory retrieval processes, but also reflects modulation by an emotion-induced recognition bias.