The power of emotional valence—from cognitive to affective processes in reading

Abstract

The comprehension of stories requires the reader to imagine the cognitive and affective states of the characters. The content of many stories is unpleasant, as they often deal with conflict, disturbance or crisis. Nevertheless, unpleasant stories can be liked and enjoyed. In this fMRI study, we used a parametric approach to examine (1) the capacity of increasing negative valence of story contents to activate the mentalizing network (cognitive and affective theory of mind, ToM), and (2) the neural substrate of liking negatively valenced narratives. A set of 80 short narratives was compiled, ranging from neutral to negative emotional valence. For each story mean rating values on valence and liking were obtained from a group of 32 participants in a prestudy, and later included as parametric regressors in the fMRI analysis. Another group of 24 participants passively read the narratives in a three Tesla MRI scanner. Results revealed a stronger engagement of affective ToM-related brain areas with increasingly negative story valence. Stories that were unpleasant, but simultaneously liked, engaged the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), which might reflect the moral exploration of the story content. Further analysis showed that the more the mPFC becomes engaged during the reading of negatively valenced stories, the more coactivation can be observed in other brain areas related to the neural processing of affective ToM and empathy.

Individual Differences in Sensitivity to Style During Literary Reading: Insights from Eye-Tracking

“…Individual differences in sensitivity to text features has been observed before in behavioral (e.g. [54]), and neuroimaging studies [50,55], and our current findings highlight the importance of taking individual differences seriously in the study of literary reading (e.g. [6,56]).…”

When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and Affective Norms of 619 Idioms for German (PANIG)

“…Specifically, speakers were more likely to use idiomatic than literal expressions when summarizing their complaints in the presence of nonempathic interlocutors (Drew & Holt, 1988) and in topic transitions (Drew & Holt, 1998). Recent brainimaging evidence has shown that nonliteral sentences evoked stronger implicit emotional responses than literal sentences (Bohrn, Altmann, & Jacobs, 2012). Similarly, a study on taste metaphors showed that metaphorical sentences elicited enhanced activation of the amygdala compared to their literal counterparts, which were matched for valence and arousal (Citron & Goldberg, 2014).…”

“…Texts containing emotional information specifically activated the bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the left amygdala, both regions associated with emotion processing, whereas texts containing chronological or spatial information activated different and distinct networks (Ferstl, Rinck, & von Cramon, 2005;Ferstl & von Cramon, 2007). In addition, emotionally negative texts activated brain regions associated with theory of mind as well as the vmPFC more strongly than did texts containing emotionally neutral information (Altmann, Bohrn, Lubrich, Menninghaus, & Jacobs, 2012).…”

Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers.

“…Language processing is affected by emotional content and this is the case even for single words (e.g., Altmann, Bohrn, Lubrich, Menninghaus & Jacobs, 2012).…”