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

Huete‐Pérez, Daniel; Haro, Juan; Hinojosa, José Antonio; Ferré, Pilar

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.04.018

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…No differences between fearful and neutral faces were found when attending to line orientation, but faster responses to fearful faces were made in the sex discrimination task, and slower responses in the emotion task. This fits recent findings highlighting the impact of task focus on reaction time differences and showing that, for example, a differentiation between fear- and anger-related words occurs only when approach-withdrawal decisions are focused ( Huete-Pérez et al., 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

Schindler

Bruchmann

Steinweg

et al. 2020

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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The processing of fearful facial expressions is prioritized by the human brain. This priority is maintained across various information processing stages as evident in early, intermediate and late components of event-related brain potentials (ERP). However, emotional modulations are inconsistently reported for these different processing stages. In this preregistered study, we investigated how feature-based attention differentially affects ERPs to fearful and neutral faces in 40 participants. The tasks required participants to discriminate either the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the sex of the face, or the face’s emotional expression, increasing attention to emotion-related features. We found main effects of emotion for the N170, EPN and LPP. While N170 emotional modulations were task-independent, interactions of emotion and task were observed for the EPN and LPP. While EPN emotion effects were found in the sex and emotion tasks, the LPP emotion effect was mainly driven by the emotion task. This study shows that early responses to fearful faces are task-independent (N170) and likely based on low-level and configural information, while during later processing stages, attention to the face (EPN) or—more specifically—to the face’s emotional expression (LPP) is crucial for reliable amplified processing of emotional faces.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

Schindler

Bruchmann

Steinweg

et al. 2020

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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“…Indeed, positive emotions are generally correlated with approach tendencies, whereas negative emotions are linked to withdrawal/avoidance tendencies (e.g., Roseman, 2008). Although such action tendencies have been scarcely investigated when the emotional stimuli are words, a few studies suggest that they may have also a role in word processing (e.g., Citron et al, 2016;Huete-Pérez et al, 2019). The congruency/incongruency between the action tendencies associated with the distinct meanings of ambiguous words might account for the present findings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 52%

Emotionality effects in ambiguous word recognition: The crucial role of the affective congruence between distinct meanings of ambiguous words

Ferré

Haro

Huete‐Pérez

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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There is substantial evidence that affectively charged words (e.g., party or gun) are processed differently from neutral words (e.g., pen), although there are also inconsistent findings in the field. Some lexical or semantic variables might explain such inconsistencies, due to the possible modulation of affective word processing by these variables. The aim of the present study was to examine the extent to which affective word processing is modulated by semantic ambiguity. We conducted a large lexical decision study including semantically ambiguous words (e.g., cataract) and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., terrorism), analyzing the extent to which reaction times (RTs) were influenced by their affective properties. The findings revealed a valence effect in which positive valence made RTs faster while negative valence slowed them. The valence effect diminished as the semantic ambiguity of words increased. This decrease did not affect all ambiguous words, but was observed mainly in ambiguous words with incongruent affective meanings. These results highlight the need to consider the affective properties of the distinct meanings of ambiguous words in research on affective word processing.

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“…There were 35 anger words and 35 fear words. Since prior findings have shown that a “distancing” response should be expected for both fear and anger words ( Huete-Pérez et al, 2019 ), we also selected 70 positive happiness-related words as fillers to match the number of “approach” responses in the task. Words were selected from several normative studies ( Ferré et al, 2012 , 2017 ; Guasch et al, 2016 ; Hinojosa et al, 2016a ; Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al, 2017 ; Stadthagen-González et al, 2018 ) using the EmoFinder ( Fraga et al, 2018 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Independent t -tests showed that fear words and anger words were matched in valence ( p = 0.587), arousal ( p = 0.129), happiness ( p = 0.956), sadness ( p = 0.455), disgust ( p = 0.106), the target emotion (i.e., the average fear score of fear words vs. the average anger score for anger words; p = 0.129), and the contrast emotion (i.e., the average anger value for fear words vs. the average fear value for anger words; p = 0.305). Also, as illustrated in Table 1 , stimuli were statistically matched (all p ≥ 0.096) in age of acquisition ( Alonso et al, 2015 ; Huete-Pérez et al, 2019 ), concreteness and familiarity ( Ferré et al, 2012 ; Duchon et al, 2013 ; Guasch et al, 2016 ; Hinojosa et al, 2016b ; Huete-Pérez et al, 2019 ), number of higher frequency lexical neighbors, number of lexical neighbors, logarithm of contextual diversity, logarithm of lemma frequency, logarithm of word frequency, mean Levenshtein distance of the 20 closets words, number of syllables, and word length ( Duchon et al, 2013 ). We used the K-means clustering procedure for this matching ( Guasch et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of note, in these studies the contribution of motivational directions to the processing of emotional words is subsidiary of the two affective dimensions of valence and arousal. To circumvent this limitation, a recent study compared the processing of fear and anger words that were matched in valence and arousal, but gave rise to different approach and avoidance motivational action tendencies ( Huete-Pérez et al, 2019 ). In this sense, anger typically elicits approach-related behaviors (fight).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2022

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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.

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

Cited by 10 publications

References 72 publications

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

Emotionality effects in ambiguous word recognition: The crucial role of the affective congruence between distinct meanings of ambiguous words

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

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