There is much empirical evidence that words’ relative imageability and body-object interaction (BOI) facilitate lexical processing for concrete nouns (e.g., Bennett et al., 2011). These findings are consistent with a grounded cognition framework (e.g., Barsalou, 2008), in which sensorimotor knowledge is integral to lexical processing. In the present study, we examined whether lexical processing is also sensitive to the dimension of emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotional experience), which is also derived from a grounded cognition framework. We examined the effects of emotional experience, imageability, and BOI in semantic categorization for concrete and abstract nouns. Our results indicate that for concrete nouns, emotional experience was associated with less accurate categorization, whereas imageability and BOI were associated with faster and more accurate categorization. For abstract nouns, emotional experience was associated with faster and more accurate categorization, whereas BOI was associated with slower and less accurate categorization. This pattern of results was observed even with many other lexical and semantic dimensions statistically controlled. These findings are consistent with Vigliocco et al.’s (2009) theory of semantic representation, which states that emotional knowledge underlies meanings for abstract concepts, whereas sensorimotor knowledge underlies meanings for concrete concepts.

Previous research has examined the effects of emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotion information) in semantic categorization (SCT), word naming, and Stroop tasks (Newcombe et al., 2012; Siakaluk et al., 2014; Moffat et al., 2015). However, to date there are no published reports on whether emotional experience influences performance in the lexical decision task (LDT). In the present study, we examined the influence of emotional experience in LDT using three different stimulus sets. In Experiment 1 we used a stimulus set used by both Kousta et al. (2009; Experiment 1) and Yap and Seow (2014) that is comprised of 40 negative, 40 positive, and 40 neutral words; in Experiment 2 we used a stimulus set comprised of 150 abstract nouns; and in Experiment 3 we used a stimulus set comprised of 373 verbs. We observed facilitatory effects of emotional experience in each of the three experiments, such that words with higher emotional experience ratings were associated with faster response latencies. These results are important because the influence of emotional experience: (a) is observed in stimulus sets comprised of different types of words, demonstrating the generalizability of the effect in LDT; (b) accounts for LDT response latency variability above and beyond the influences of valence and arousal, and is thus a robust dimension of conceptual knowledge; (c) suggests that a richer representation of emotional experience provides more reliable evidence that a stimulus is a word, which facilitates responding in LDT; and (d) is consistent with grounded cognition frameworks that propose that emotion information may be grounded in bodily experience with the world (Barsalou, 2003, 2009; Vigliocco et al., 2009).

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