How does emotional content affect lexical processing?

Abstract

Even single words in isolation can evoke emotional reactions, but the mechanisms by which emotion is involved in automatic lexical processing are unclear. Previous studies using extremely similar materials and methods have yielded apparently incompatible patterns of results. In much previous work, however, words' emotional content is entangled with other non-emotional characteristics such as frequency of occurrence, familiarity and age of acquisition, all of which have potential consequences for lexical processing themselves. In the present study, the authors compare different models of emotion using the British Lexicon Project, a large-scale freely available lexical decision database. After controlling for the potentially confounding effects of non-emotional variables, a variety of statistical approaches revealed that emotional words, whether positive or negative, are processed faster than neutral words. This effect appears to be categorical rather than graded; is not modulated by emotional arousal; and is not limited to words explicitly referring to emotions. The authors suggest that emotional connotations facilitate processing due to the grounding of words' meanings in emotional experience.

Spanish norms for affective and lexico-semantic variables for 1,400 words

“…Briefly, a remarkable number of studies have shown advantages in processing and memory for emotional words with respect to neutral words (e.g., Ferré et al, 2013;Kuperman et al, 2014;Vinson et al, 2014). The two variables par excellence in this domain, valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity), were examined in the present study.…”

“…Valence describes the extent to which an emotion is pleasant or unpleasant, whereas arousal refers to its degree of activation. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that emotional content affects word processing in a variety of experimental tasks and paradigms, such as lexical decision (e.g., Vinson, Ponari, & Vigliocco, 2014), naming (e.g., Kuperman, Estes, Brysbaert, & Warriner, 2014), emotional Stroop tasks (e.g., Eilola, Havelka, & Sharma, 2007), valence judgments (e.g., Estes & Verges, 2008), short-term memory tasks (e.g., Majerus & D'Argembeau, 2011), and long-term memory tasks (e.g., Ferré, Sánchez-Casas, & Fraga, 2013). Emotionality also has a neural signature, as revealed by ERP data (see Citron, 2012, for an overview).…”

Negative affect does not impact semantic retrieval failure monitoring.

“…However, given emotional items facilitate lexical processing in contrast to neutral items (e.g. Vinson, Ponari & Vigliocco, 2014), such a finding could be reconciled with a linguistic account of TOT.…”

Psycholinguistic estimates of 3000 words of Croatian: concreteness and imageability

“…U kontekstu istra`ivanja strukture mentalnoga leksikona iznimno je va`no za svaki pojedini jezik normirati neke kategorije za koje je jo{ sedamdesetih godina 20. stolje}a pokazano kako u bitnome utje~u na brzinu i na dubinu jezi~ne obrade, kao {to su konkretnost i predo~ivost rije~i (vidi Paivio, Yuille i Madigan 1968 i pregled na hrvatskome u Tu{ek i Peti-Stanti} u tisku). To je potrebno u~initi i za kategorije koje se istra`uju tek odnedavna, kao {to su emocionalna obojenost ili valencija rije~i (Kousta et al 2011;Vinson, Ponari i Vigliocco 2014). Navedene se norme utvr|uju na temelju procjena izvornih govornika.…”