Effects of emotion information on processing pain-related words in visual word recognition

Abstract

We examined the effects of emotion information (valence, arousal, and emotional experience) on lexical decision and semantic categorization (using a “Is the word pain-related or not?” decision criterion) performance for pain-related words. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we observed facilitatory effects of emotional experience in both tasks, such that faster responses were associated with higher emotional experience ratings. We observed a marginally significant valence effect in the semantic categorization task, such that faster responses were associated with more unpleasantness ratings. These effects were observed even with several other predictor variables (e.g., frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness, physical pain experience ratings) included in the analyses. These results suggest that the dimensions of emotional experience and (to a lesser degree) valence underlie emotion conceptual knowledge of pain-related words; however, their influence appears to be dynamic, depending on task demands.

God in body and space: Investigating the sensorimotor grounding of abstract concepts

“…Relatedly, another possibility is that grounding of these concepts relies heavily on interoceptive experience in addition to sensorimotor experiences of space and body posture. Indeed, interoception may be a primary modality for grounding abstract concepts (e.g., Kousta et al, 2011 ; Duris et al, 2017 ), and thus faith concepts like DEVIL might be grounded more by affective information like other affectively loaded words (e.g., DEATH is understood spatially with up vs. down metaphors in different languages; see Gathigia et al, 2018 ). Future research should investigate the unique, weighted contributions of visuospatial, bodily, and interoceptive information in conceptual grounding (e.g., Lynott et al, 2020 ).…”