Emotional Verbal Fluency: A New Task on Emotion and Executive Function Interaction

Abstract

The present study introduces “Emotional Verbal Fluency” as a novel (partially computerized) task, which is aimed to investigate the interaction between emotionally loaded words and executive functions. Verbal fluency tasks are thought to measure executive functions but the interaction with emotional aspects is hardly investigated. In the current study, a group of healthy subjects (n = 21, mean age 25 years, 76% females) were asked to generate items that are either part of a semantic category (e.g., plants, toys, vehicles; standard semantic verbal fluency) or can trigger the emotions joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The results of the task revealed no differences between performance on semantic and emotional categories, suggesting a comparable task difficulty for healthy subjects. Hence, these first results on the comparison between semantic and emotional verbal fluency seem to highlight that both might be suitable for examining executive functioning. However, an interaction was found between the category type and repetition (first vs. second sequence of the same category) with larger performance decrease for semantic in comparison to emotional categories. Best performance overall was found for the emotional category “joy” suggesting a positivity bias in healthy subjects. To conclude, emotional verbal fluency is a promising approach to investigate emotional components in an executive task, which may stimulate further research, especially in psychiatric patients who suffer from emotional as well as cognitive deficits.

Functional Perspectives on Emotion, Behavior, and Cognition

“…Two manuscripts addressed this question by examining how the interaction among components impacts situations common to daily experience. Sass, Fetz, Oetken, Habel, and Heim [ 8 ] focused on how emotions relate to executive functioning, which broadly reflects the ability to control and regulate cognition and behavior. They present evidence that emotional processes likely play a role in tasks that measure executive functioning.…”

The Structure of the Concepts Related to Love Spectrum: Emotional Verbal Fluency Technique Application, Initial Psychometrics, and Its Validation

“…Emotional/affective verbal fluency (EVF) is a novel and rarely used semantic fluency type which can take a variety of forms: positive versus negative, pleasant versus non-pleasant, joy versus fear, etc. (Gawda and Szepietowska 2013, 2016; Gawda et al 2017; GSass et al 2013). Furthermore, a new approach to examining the words generated by subjects has been proposed here.…”

“…To our knowledge, few results based on the use of such a methodology have been published, and traditional indicators, such as the number of correct responses, errors, semantic switches, semantic clusters, phonemic switches, and phonemic clusters have been taken into consideration in the analyses; typical analysis usually consists in quantifying the total production of words (e.g. Abeare et al 2017; Gawda and Szepietowska 2013, 2016; Rossell 2006; Sass et al 2013; Wauters and Marquardt 2017).…”

The structure of lay-concepts within the fear spectrum revealed using emotional verbal fluency

“…These tasks involve listing of words associated with emotional categories. These involve emotional categories such as negative or positive, unpleasant, pleasant, love, fear, joy, sadness among many others (Gawda andSzepietowska 2013, 2016;Gawda et al 2017;Sass et al 2013). In literature, there are a few studies exploring emotional verbal fluency, however, they use traditional (quantitative) indicators, such as the number of correct responses, errors, clusters, and switches (e.g.…”