Asymmetry of affect in verbal irony understanding: What about the N400 and P600 components?

Caillies, Stéphanie; Gobin, Paméla; Obert, Alexandre; Terrien, Soizic; Iakimova, Galina; Besche‐Richard, Chrystel

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2019.04.004

Cited by 29 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…A reason for this difficulty identifying teasing could be the so-called "asymmetry of affect" (Clark & Gerrig, 1984), which refers to the asymmetric findings regarding the use and perception of sarcasm and teasing. It states that sarcasm generally occurs more frequently than teasing (Clark & Gerrig, 1984;Matthews et al, 2006;Sperber & Wilson, 1981) and there is additional data showing that sarcasm is often recognized earlier and more accurately compared to teasing (Caillies et al, 2019;Harris & Pexman, 2003). The current data also provide corroborating evidence for the influence of aging on perceiving nonliteral language (Phillips et al, 2015;Pomareda et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

The Impact of Parkinson’s Disease on Social Perception: Preliminary Evidence

Rothermich¹,

Rountree²,

Scott³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Besides motor symptoms, people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) often exhibit social cognition difficulties. The assessment of social cognition in early PD is crucial, as these deficits may impact patients' social interactions and quality of life. The current study used naturalistic, dynamic video clips to examine the ability of individuals with idiopathic PD to perceive speaker intentions in comparison with healthy controls (HC). Neuropsychological evaluation of the PD patients was conducted using the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test (CLQT). Video stimuli were taken from the Relational Inference in Social Communication database (RISC; Rothermich & Pell, 2015) and contained literal, sarcastic, and teasing scenes. The participant’s task was to identify the speaker’s belief, i.e., if they were sincere or insincere. The results show that in general, all participants had a harder time identifying nonliteral statements such as teasing as insincere when compared to literal statements. A group analysis demonstrated a marginally significant effect between people with PD and HCs, showing that individuals with PD were less accurate in recognizing social intent compared to HC. This difference was possibly driven by changes in cognitive abilities due to the progression of PD. Indeed, analyses for the PD group revealed positive correlations between several cognitive domains, such as attention and memory, and performance on the speaker belief task. Taken together, our study sheds light on the relationship between cognitive mechanisms and social perception impairments in PD and supports the development of targeted tools for diagnosing and treating these impairments.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 72%

The Impact of Parkinson’s Disease on Social Perception: Preliminary Evidence

Rothermich¹,

Rountree²,

Scott³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…Saying "You're such a lousy driver" to a friend who is clearly very good implies an intent to playfully compliment, not to criticize. Despite similarities in structure, the intent of ironic compliments does not seem to be recognized as accurately as ironic criticisms or processed in the same manner (Bruntsch & Ruch, 2017;Caillies et al, 2019;Caffarra et al, 2019). This may be due to the "asymmetry of affect" (Matthews, Hancock, & Dunham, 2006;Pexman & Olineck, 2002).…”

Section: Verbal Irony and Prosodymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Thus, while it can be said that prosody is sufficient to point listeners to a nonliteral interpretation for both types of irony in the absence of other cues, listeners seem to accord greater perceptual weight to the negative semantic content of ironic compliments and less to the speaker's stance for this type of remark (see also , Carretié, Mercado, Tapia, & Hinojosa, 2001;Kreuz & Link, 2002;Kumon-Nakamura et al, 1995;Leary, 2000). This raises the possibility that distinct neurocognitive mechanisms act on prosody when processing ironic criticisms and ironic compliments (Caillies et al, 2019). Moreover, the time course of prosodic effects on the neurocognitive system may be unique as listeners build an ironic interpretation for positive and negative statements, although this question has not been comprehensively addressed.…”

Section: Verbal Irony and Prosodymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When target sentences are incongruent with previous descriptions of events and imply irony, an increased P600/late positivity has been reported from the onset of a critical word in ironic versus literal sentences (Cornejo et al, 2007;Regel, Gunter, & Friederici, 2011;Regel, Meyer, & Gunter, 2014;Spotorno, Cheylus, Van Der Henst, & Noveck, 2013;Weissman & Tanner, 2018). Some work also suggests that irony modulates the N400 under certain conditions (Caillies et al, 2019;Cornejo et al, 2007;Filik, Leuthold, Wallington, & Page, 2014;Kowatch, Whalen, & Pexman, 2013) or may even be registered earlier (in the 200-400ms time window, Caffara et al, 2019;Filik et al, 2014;Regel et al 2010Regel et al , 2011Regel et al , 2014Spotorno et al, 2013). Typically, N400 and P600 effects are elicited by mismatches in meaning, with larger peaks attributed to greater processing effort and/or unexpected information (Brouwer, Crocker, Venhuizen, & Hoeks, 2017;Brouwer, Fitz, & Hoeks, 2012;Kutas & Federmeier, 2010;Thierry, Berkum, Brouwer, & Crocker, 2017).…”

Section: Neurocognitive Studies Of Verbal Ironymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Immediate online use of prosody reveals the ironic intentions of a speaker: neurophysiological evidence

Mauchand

Caballero

Jiang

et al. 2021

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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In social interactions, speakers often use their tone of voice ("prosody") to communicate their interpersonal stance to pragmatically mark an ironic intention (e.g., sarcasm). The neurocognitive effects of prosody as listeners process ironic statements in real time are still poorly understood. In this study, 30 participants judged the friendliness of literal and ironic criticisms and compliments in the absence of context while their electrical brain activity was recorded. Event-related potentials reflecting the uptake of prosodic information were tracked at two time points in the utterance. Prosody robustly modulated P200 and late positivity amplitudes from utterance onset. These early neural responses registered both the speaker's stance (positive/negative) and their intention (literal/ironic). At a later timepoint (You are such a great/horrible cook), P200, N400, and P600 amplitudes were all greater when the critical word valence was congruent with the speaker's vocal stance, suggesting that irony was contextually facilitated by early effects from prosody. Our results exemplify that rapid uptake of salient prosodic features allows listeners to make online predictions about the speaker's ironic intent. This process can constrain their representation of an utterance to uncover nonliteral meanings without violating contextual expectations held about the speaker, as described by parallel-constraint satisfaction models.

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“…Such positive effects are often long-lasting and are sometimes taken to involve the LPC [78,80,81]. Conversely, N400 effects are present only in a limited set of cases, for instance p r e -p r i n t when irony is used in a positive context (ironic praise) [78,82,83] -commenting What a sad prize!, after winning a huge sum of money -and in more "unfamiliar" forms of irony [79]. It is also worth noting that it is not unlikely to find that irony induces even earlier effects in the ERPs, often involving the P200 component [e.g., 73].…”

Section: Eeg Indexes For Mind Reading Pragmaticsmentioning

confidence: 99%