Event related potentials to emotional adjectives during reading

Abstract

We investigated to what extent emotional connotation influences cortical potentials during reading. To this end, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during reading of high arousal pleasant and unpleasant and low arousal neutral adjectives that were presented at rates of 1 Hz and 3 Hz. Enhanced processing of both pleasant and unpleasant emotional compared to neutral adjectives was first reflected in an amplified early posterior negativity (EPN) starting from 200 ms after word onset. Later potentials (>300 ms), as analyzed in the slower 1 Hz condition, revealed facilitated processing selectively for pleasant adjectives that were associated with a reduced N400 and an enhanced late positive potential (LPP). Pleasant adjectives were also better remembered in an incidental memory test. Thus, emotionally relevant adjectives are processed spontaneously and selectively. Initially, emotional arousal drives attention capture (EPN). Healthy subjects may have a natural bias toward pleasant information facilitating late ERPs (N400, LPP) to pleasant adjectives as well as their superior recall.

Emotionality in a second language: It's a matter of time

“…Positive, negative, and neutral words were presented randomly in a LMT while brain electrophysiological responses were recorded. We found the EPN to be consistently enhanced to emotionally valent (positive and negative) as compared to neutral words, replicating previous results of native language research (Herbert et al, 2008;Kissler et al, 2009;Scott et al, 2009). Importantly, this valence effect showed a bilateral occipito-temporal negativity, which is the typical scalp distribution of the EPN (e.g., Schupp et al, 2003).…”

“…Importantly, this valence effect showed a bilateral occipito-temporal negativity, which is the typical scalp distribution of the EPN (e.g., Schupp et al, 2003). However, the EPN emotion effect in the present study was observed slightly later than emotion effects recently reported by others (Herbert et al, 2008;Kissler et al, 2007).…”

“…These ERPs included all artefact-free trials irrespective of accuracy to compare the present results with the results of previous studies averaging across all stimuli (cf., Herbert et al, 2008;Kissler et al, 2007Kissler et al, , 2009). Moreover, this ensured an equal signal-to-noise ratio across stimulus types and language.…”

“…Using well-controlled verbal stimulus material these studies consistently report an early (around 200 to 320ms) enhanced negativity for positive and negative emotionally arousing words compared to neutral words that occurs predominantly at left temporo-occipital electrode sites. This so-called early posterior negativity effect (EPN) has been demonstrated to be independent of the word class, thus for nouns, verbs and adjectives that were matched for a number of other potentially relevant dimensions such as word length, word frequency or concreteness (Herbert et al, 2008;Kissler et al, 2009;Schacht & Sommer, 2009a). The EPN is 5 elicited at various presentation rates (Herbert et al, 2008;Kissler et al, 2007) and seems independent of the actual task requirements, as it was found using silent reading and nonemotional grammatical decision tasks (e.g., Kissler et al, 2007Kissler et al, , 2009) as well as lexical decision tasks (Schacht & Sommer, 2009a;Scott et al, 2009).…”

“…The effects of emotional content on word processing have been extensively investigated in L1 (Herbert, Junghöfer & Kissler, 2008;Kissler, Herbert, Peyk & Junghöfer, 2007;Schacht & Sommer, 2009a;Scott, O'Donnell, Leuthold & Sereno, 2009). Using well-controlled verbal stimulus material these studies consistently report an early (around 200 to 320ms) enhanced negativity for positive and negative emotionally arousing words compared to neutral words that occurs predominantly at left temporo-occipital electrode sites.…”