Task-dependent evaluative processing of moral and emotional content during comprehension: An ERP study

Abstract

Recently, we showed that when participants passively read about moral transgressions (e.g., adultery), they implicitly engage in the evaluative (good-bad) categorization of incoming information, as indicated by a larger event-related brain potential (ERP) positivity to immoral than to moral scenarios (Leuthold, Kunkel, Mackenzie, & Filik in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 1021-1029, 2015). Behavioral and neuroimaging studies indicated that explicit moral tasks prioritize the semantic-cognitive analysis of incoming information but that implicit tasks, as used in Leuthold et al. (Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 1021-1029, 2015), favor their affective processing. Therefore, it is unclear whether an affective categorization process is also involved when participants perform explicit moral judgments. Thus, in two experiments, we used similarly constructed morality and emotion materials for which their moral and emotional content had to be inferred from the context. Target sentences from negative vs. neutral emotional scenarios and from moral vs. immoral scenarios were presented using rapid serial visual presentation. In Experiment 1, participants made moral judgments for moral materials and emotional judgments for emotion materials. Negative compared to neutral emotional scenarios elicited a larger posterior ERP positivity (LPP) about 200 ms after critical word onset, whereas immoral compared to moral scenarios elicited a larger anterior negativity (500-700 ms). In Experiment 2, where the same emotional judgment to both types of materials was required, a larger LPP was triggered for both types of materials. These results accord with the view that morality scenarios trigger a semantic-cognitive analysis when participants explicitly judge the moral content of incoming linguistic information but an affective evaluation when judging their emotional content.

Cognitive and Emotional Appraisal of Motivational Interviewing Statements: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…The more positive going P600 was found to associate with the reprocessing of syntactic after semantic integration (Delogu et al, 2019 ). In moral studies, more positive-going LPC was found to relate to the processing of value-inconsistent statements when compared with value-consistent statements (Kunkel et al, 2018 ). Taken together, the more positive-going LPC would reflect appraisal of the syntactic content of the statements which to the injured workers have a salient emotion component.…”

Examining the influence of perspective and prosody on expected emotional responses to irony: Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

“…Regarding the processing of the target emotional response (e.g., words such as amused in Experiment 1, and hurt in Experiment 2), studies using non-constraining contexts or emotional contexts have typically shown a larger late posterior positivity (LPP) to emotional than non-emotional materials, reflecting the intensity of affective processing both when the affective content has to be judged (e.g., Delaney-Busch & Kuperberg, 2013; Kunkel et al, 2018) and when merely reading for comprehension (e.g., Kunkel et al, under review). Specifically, we predict participants will find humor to be a better fit for the speaker’s intent, and hurtfulness to be a better fit for the target’s response.…”

“…The ERPs triggered by the critical word in the final sentence were analyzed as in a previous study from our lab concerned with emotional text comprehension during reading (Kunkel et al, under review). That is, mean ERP amplitudes were determined for the two time ranges 300–600 ms and 600–1,000 ms at electrodes close to the midline (CP1, CPz, CP2, P1, Pz, P2, POz) that were pooled to form one posterior region of interest (ROI).…”

Effect of AQP4‑RNAi in treating traumatic brain edema: Multi‑modal MRI and histopathological changes of early stage edema in a rat model

“…In America, TBI contributes to 30% of all deaths associated with head trauma and 3.2 million disabilities each year (2). The disturbance of water homeostasis in the brain is an important pathological change in TBI, where brain edema following TBI remains to be the predominant cause of mortality and disability among patients admitted to the neurology department (3,4). TBI can directly cause brain damage, and the resulting brain edema increases intracranial pressure and can lead to brain ischemia and mortality (5).…”