Be aware of the rifle but do not forget the stench: differential effects of fear and disgust on lexical processing and memory

Ferré, Pilar; Haro, Juan; Hinojosa, José Antonio

doi:10.1080/02699931.2017.1356700

Cited by 25 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…Two sets of 12 disgusting words and two sets of 12 neutral words were selected from two normative studies containing ratings for five discrete emotions (Ferré et al, 2017 ; Hinojosa et al, 2016 ) and used as auditory distractors in the oddball task, and as targets and foils in a subsequent surprise recognition task. The disgusting and neutral words were matched with respect to familiarity, imageability, concreteness, age of acquisition, word frequency (log value), number of letters, number of syllables, number of lexical neighbors, high frequency neighbors, mean Levenshtein distance of the 20 closest words, contextual diversity (log value), bigram frequency, and trigram frequency.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In line with past work on the effect of deviant sounds, we predicted that both types of deviant stimuli would, by virtue of violating sensory predictions, yield longer response times than standard sounds. More importantly, based on the results of previous work suggesting that disgusting stimuli grab attention more than neutral stimuli, we predicted that, compared to neutral words, disgusting words should yield greater distraction in the cross-modal oddball task, and superior memory performance in the recognition task (Ferré et al, 2017). Furthermore, these specific effects of disgusting words should increase with the participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, a prediction we assessed by measuring the correlation between performance in the cross-modal oddball and recognition tasks on the one hand, and the participants' score on a disgust sensitivity scale on the other.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Indeed, relative to neutral and fearful words, disgust words yield longer response times in a color naming Stroop task and are better recalled in a subsequent surprise recall test (Charash & McKay, 2002 ). More recently, Ferré, Haro and Hinojosa ( 2017 ) reported that, compared to neutral words, disgusting and fearful words elicit longer response times in a lexical decision task, and that disgusting (but not fearful) words leave stronger memory traces than neutral words in a surprise recall (Experiment 1) or recognition (Experiment 2) task. The authors interpreted these findings as reflecting the greater automatic allocation of attentional resources to negative stimuli, and the idea that disgusting words may receive greater involuntary semantic encoding and elicit stronger memory traces.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Parmentier

Fraga

Leiva

et al. 2019

Psychological Research

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Several studies have argued that words evoking negative emotions, such as disgust, grab attention more than neutral words, and leave traces in memory that are more persistent. However, these conclusions are typically based on tasks requiring participants to process the semantic content of these words in a voluntarily manner. We sought to compare the involuntary attention grabbing power of disgusting and neutral words using them as rare and unexpected auditory distractors in a cross-modal oddball task, and then probing the participants’ memory for these stimuli in a surprise recognition task. Frequentist and Bayesian analyses converged to show that, compared to a standard tone, disgusting and neutral auditory words produced significant but equivalent levels of distraction in a visual categorization task, that they elicited comparable levels of memory discriminability in the incidental recognition task, and that the participants’ individual sensitivity to disgust did not influence the results. Our results suggest that distraction by unexpected words is not modulated by their emotional valence, at least when these words are task-irrelevant and are temporally and perceptually decoupled from the target stimuli.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Parmentier

Fraga

Leiva

et al. 2019

Psychological Research

Self Cite

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“…It has been suggested that people might be aversive to imagining disgusting words because of their strong negative connotations (Thibodeau, 2016). Indeed, words eliciting disgust showed consistent processing disadvantage (Briesemeister, Kuchinke, & Jacobs, 2011; Ferré, Haro, & Hinojosa, 2018). Taking into account that food-wasting behavior was considered mostly morally disgusting, its ratings of imageability might be lowered because of its moral association with disgusting behavior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wasting food is disgusting: Evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging study of moral judgment of food-wasting behavior

Marczak

Marchewka

Wypych

et al. 2019

Preprint

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24Food-wasting has a profound negative social and environmental impact. Acknowledging that 25 referring to moral judgment can motivate behavior change, the present study aimed to determine 26 moral intuitions underlying the perception of food-wasting behavior. We developed a set of 27 affective standardized scenarios and we used them to collect behavioral and neuroimaging data. In 28 the main study, 50 participants made moral judgments regarding food-wasting, disgusting, 29 harmful, dishonest, or neutral behaviors presented in these scenarios. We found that wasting food 30 was considered morally wrong and it was associated with moral disgust. Neuroimaging data 31 revealed that food-wasting stimuli elicited an increased activity in structures associated with moral 32 judgment, as well as in regions involved in the processing of moral, but also physical disgust. We 33 discuss our results in the context of the evolutionary significance of food that might have led to 34 seeing food-wasting as a moral transgression. 35 36 37 38 WASTING FOOD IS DISGUSTING 3 Wasting food is disgusting: 39 Evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging study of moral judgment of food-wasting behavior 40 41

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“…No differences between disgust-and fear-related word pairs were found for these factors. A recent study attributed the higher level of free recall for disgust-related than neutral and fear-related words to deeper elaborative encoding 42 . Since the nature of our task (creating common mental representations of word pairs) forced elaborative processing for all the experimental conditions, it should eliminate also such differences.…”

Section: Differences In Memory Modulation By Disgust and Fearmentioning

confidence: 98%

Distinct medial-temporal lobe mechanisms of encoding and amygdala-mediated memory reinstatement for disgust and fear

Riegel

Wierzba

Wypych

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Many associative memory traces are charged with emotion that can either impair or enhance subsequent retrieval. Various factors may influence such emotion effects, including the nature of associations and type of emotions. We show that long-term recognition memory of very close verbal associations was enhanced for emotionally charged material, and these effects differed between two negative emotion categories matched for arousal level. Specifically, memory was better for word pairs related to disgust than word pairs related to fear. Furthermore, these two emotions distinctively modulated neural processes during encoding and its relationship with retrieval, regardless of arousal evoked by word pairs. Amygdala and perirhinal cortex activity were associated with enhanced memory for disgust-related unitizations, whereas better memory for fear-related unitizations engaged parahippocampal cortex and hippocampus. Finally, the magnitude of amygdala activation during encoding was related to the subsequent fidelity of hippocampal activity patterns during retrieval. These results show that dissociable neural pathways and reinstatement mechanisms are involved in associative memory for different emotion categories and that arousal alone cannot fully explain emotional influences on associative memory.individually control for the effects of valence and arousal dimensions. Most importantly, this paradigm enabled us to compare the encoding-retrieval similarity of brain activation patterns elicited across two different emotion categories and determine which brain regions promoted this measure of neural reinstatement.We found a memory enhancement effect due to emotion. Moreover, word pairs related to disgust were remembered better than word pairs related to fear, and this effect could not be explained by differences in arousal. We found distinctive neural pathways preferentially engaged in encoding modulation by disgust or fear. Specifically, the left AMY and left PRC were more activated during successful encoding of disgust-related unitized word pairs, whereas right PHC and HC were more activated for fear-related unitized word pairs, even when the level of arousal was regressed out from the analysis. Moreover, during successful encoding of disgust-compared to fearrelated word pairs, we observed an increase in functional connectivity between AMY, PRC and PHC. Finally, for disgusting compared to fearful word pairs, the left AMY encoding activation was found to be critical for the level of trial-by-trial encodingretrieval similarity of brain activation patterns.Altogether, the results show that behavioural and neuronal mechanisms of long-term associative memory can be differently modulated by basic emotion categories, over and above of valence and arousal dimensions. For the first time, we revealed that due to AMY and PRC engagement, disgust as opposed to fear has a strong influence on reinstatement and recognition memory of unitized word pairs, which is in line with its distinctive and perhaps evolutionary-driven role in memorizing ...

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Be aware of the rifle but do not forget the stench: differential effects of fear and disgust on lexical processing and memory

Cited by 25 publications

References 44 publications

Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Wasting food is disgusting: Evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging study of moral judgment of food-wasting behavior

Distinct medial-temporal lobe mechanisms of encoding and amygdala-mediated memory reinstatement for disgust and fear

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