The N400 indexes acquisition of novel emotion concepts via conceptual combination

Abstract

The ability to learn new emotion concepts is adaptive and socially valuable as it communicates culturally held understandings about values, goals, and experiences. Yet, little work has examined the underlying mechanisms that allow for new emotion concepts and words to be integrated into the conceptual system. One such mechanism may be conceptual combination, or the ability to form novel concepts by dynamically combining previously acquired conceptual knowledge. In this study, we used event‐related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of novel emotion concept acquisition via conceptual combination. Participants were briefly trained on 30 novel emotion combinations, each consisting of two English emotion words (the components; e.g., “sadness + fatigue”) and a pseudoword (the target; e.g., “despip”). Participants then completed a semantic congruency task while ERPs were recorded. On each trial, two components were presented serially, followed by a target; participants judged whether the target was a valid combination of the preceding components. Targets could be correct or incorrect trained pseudowords, or new untrained pseudowords. Furthermore, components could be presented in reversed order (e.g., “fatigue” then “sadness”) or as synonyms (e.g., “exhaustion” for “fatigue”). Consistent with our main hypotheses, we found a main effect of target, such that the correct combinations showed reduced N400 amplitudes when compared to both incorrect and untrained pseudowords. Critically, this effect held regardless of how the preceding components were presented, suggesting deeper semantic learning. These results extend prior findings on conceptual combination and novel word learning, and are congruent with predictive processing accounts of brain function.

Assessing the power of words to facilitate emotion category learning

“…For example, participants may have been able to construct instances of kreng jai by combining previous experiences of gratitude and guilt. Conceptual combination has been hypothesized to support performance in crosscultural emotion perception tasks (Hoemann, Crittenden, et al, 2019) and has been shown to underlie acquisition of novel emotion concepts (Hoemann et al, 2021). As such, it may represent an alternate mechanism of category learning: instead of creating emotion categories from scratch, participants may have productively applied existing category knowledge.…”

Effects of emotion words activation and satiation on facial expression perception: evidence from behavioral and ERP investigations

“…However, Bridger et al and Strozak et al separated semantic priming test and semantic recognition test and found that FN400 was also associated with semantic information familiarity as well as the recognition process ( 41 , 42 ). However, in Hoemann et al's study exploring the acquisition of emotional concepts, the FN400 was considered to have similar functions to the N400 that reflect the processing of emotional meaning ( 21 ). The functional differences between N400 and FN400 in semantic research are still debated by researchers.…”

“…Because inconsistent scene pictures from the visual channel and inconsistencies in face and identity information could also evoke a more negative N400 component (18,19), researchers have found that the N400 may be an index for the processing of meaningful stimuli as well as information integration (20). Compared with emotional consistency, the sequential presentation of stimuli with conflicting emotional meanings elicited more negative N400 amplitudes, regardless of whether the target stimuli were faces (13,16) or words (21).…”