Emotion word processing: does mood make a difference?

Abstract

Visual emotion word processing has been in the focus of recent psycholinguistic research. In general, emotion words provoke differential responses in comparison to neutral words. However, words are typically processed within a context rather than in isolation. For instance, how does one's inner emotional state influence the comprehension of emotion words? To address this question, the current study examined lexical decision responses to emotionally positive, negative, and neutral words as a function of induced mood as well as their word frequency. Mood was manipulated by exposing participants to different types of music. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions—no music, positive music, and negative music. Participants' moods were assessed during the experiment to confirm the mood induction manipulation. Reaction time results confirmed prior demonstrations of an interaction between a word's emotionality and its frequency. Results also showed a significant interaction between participant mood and word emotionality. However, the pattern of results was not consistent with mood-congruency effects. Although positive and negative mood facilitated responses overall in comparison to the control group, neither positive nor negative mood appeared to additionally facilitate responses to mood-congruent words. Instead, the pattern of findings seemed to be the consequence of attentional effects arising from induced mood. Positive mood broadens attention to a global level, eliminating the category distinction of positive-negative valence but leaving the high-low arousal dimension intact. In contrast, negative mood narrows attention to a local level, enhancing within-category distinctions, in particular, for negative words, resulting in less effective facilitation.

Music induced happy mood suppresses the neural responses to other’s pain: Evidences from an ERP study

“…The existing literature suggests that induced moods are able to influence the way we process the complex environment 21 . Numerous studies showed that the induced moods can modulate both of the cognitive and emotional processes, such as the participants’ level of self-focused attention 22–25 , visual perception strategies 26,27 , the processing of emotional words and pictures 28 . Moreover, the induced mood has also been found to be able to modulate social emotional behaviors such as moral judgment 29 and decision making during the Ultimatum Game 30 .…”

The Glasgow Norms: Ratings of 5,500 words on 9 scales

“…In such cases, RTs were often less than 400 ms. In two recent, largescale lexical decision experiments performed locally, average RTs to words were just under 600 ms (Sereno et al (2015) used 240 words with 144 participants; Yao et al (2017) used 270 words with 127 participants). Given that the judgements required in our rating tasks were, minimally, less definite and, generally, more demanding than making lexical decisions, a lower RT cutoff of 750 ms was implemented.…”

“…Oftentimes, however, researchers need to use multiple sets of smaller norms to adequately describe the characteristics of their experimental stimuli (e.g., Scott, O'Donnell, & Sereno, 2012;Sereno, Scott, Yao, Thaden, & O'Donnell, 2015). Alternatively, researchers have frequently gathered local ratings on their stimuli to insure the validity of the lexical dimension(s) of interest (e.g., Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999;Juhasz & Rayner, 2003;Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco, 2009;Yao et al, 2013Yao et al, , 2017.…”

“…In the psycholinguistic literature, emotion is generally represented within a two-dimensional framework (e.g., Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957;Russell, 1980), with greater emotionality associated with higher arousal and extreme valence. In behavioral terms, positive and negative emotion words tend to be recognized faster than comparable neutral words (e.g., Scott et al, 2009Scott et al, , 2012Scott et al, , 2014Sereno et al, 2015;Yao et al, 2017).…”

The mediational role of distracting stimuli in emotional word recognition

“…This is an effect that has been reported as a robust one on several aspects of cognition, as well as on behavior (Van Tol, Demenescu, Van der Wee, Kortekaas, Marjan, et al 2012). Several studies claimed that emotional words might capture more attention than neutral ones (Bowen, Kark, & Kensinger 2017;Sereno, Scott, Yao, Thaden, & O'Donnell 2015). More precisely, and focusing on the particular effect of negative emotional content on word recognition, it has been suggested that negative stimuli elicit slower latencies under this condition.…”