Brain processing of task-relevant and task-irrelevant emotional words: An ERP study

Abstract

Although there is evidence for preferential perceptual processing of written emotional information, the effects of attentional manipulations and the time course of affective processing require further clarification. In this study, we attempted to investigate how the emotional content of words modulates cerebral functioning (event-related potentials, ERPs) and behavior (reaction times, RTs) when the content is task-irrelevant (emotional Stroop Task, EST) or task-relevant (emotional categorization task, ECT), in a sample of healthy middle-aged women. In the EST, the RTs were longer for emotional words than for neutral words, and in the ECT, they were longer for neutral and negative words than for positive words. A principal components analysis of the ERPs identified various temporospatial factors that were differentially modified by emotional content. P2 was the first emotion-sensitive component, with enhanced factor scores for negative nouns across tasks. The N2 and late positive complex had enhanced factor scores for emotional relative to neutral information only in the ECT. The results reinforce the idea that written emotional information has a preferential processing route, both when it is task-irrelevant (producing behavioral interference) and when it is task-relevant (facilitating the categorization). After early automatic processing of the emotional content, late ERPs become more emotionally modulated as the level of attention to the valence increases.

Event-related lateralized readiness potential correlates of the emotion-priming Simon effect

“…Verbruggen and De Houwer (2007) demonstrated that the presentation of an emotional stimulus in a stop-signal paradigm prolonged both the response and stopping latencies, regardless of the valence of the emotional stimulus. Such an effect is referred to as emotional interference and is attributed to the preferential processing of emotional information as part of the evolutionary adaptive responses (Cohen et al 2012;González-Villar et al 2014;LeDoux 1995). Moreover, negative emotion might increase the emotional interference due to negativity bias, which occupies more cognitive resources (Hansen and Hansen 1988;Hilgard et al 2014;Huang and Luo 2006;Ma et al 2014).…”

Vivid: How valence and arousal influence word processing under different task demands

“…Event-related potentials (ERPs) enable just this, and there have now been a number ERP studies examining the neurocognitive processes recruited in response to emotional stimuli, including words. Some of these studies report very early effects of emotion, within the first 150ms of word-onset, with effects reported on the N1 component (Briesemeister, Kuchinke, & Jacobs, 2014; Hinojosa, Méndez-Bértolo, & Pozo, 2010; Hofmann, Kuchinke, Tamm, Võ, & Jacobs, 2009; Kissler & Herbert, 2013; Wang, Bastiaansen, Yang, & Hagoort, 2013), the P2 component (González-Villar, Triñanes, Zurrón, & Carrillo-de-la-Peña, 2014; Herbert, Kissler, Junghöfer, Peyk, & Rockstroh, 2006; Kanske & Kotz, 2007; Ortigue et al, 2004; Wang et al, 2013), or on other early perceptual components (Bayer, Sommer, & Schacht, 2012; Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, 2001; Keuper et al, 2014; Scott, O'Donnell, Leuthold, & Sereno, 2009; Zhang et al, 2014). This has been taken to reflect a very early influence of emotion on initial perceptual processing.…”

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories

“…A significant number of studies have revealed that these effects are pervasive. Indeed, modulations of the processing of words by their emotional content have been documented not only in tasks involving affective decisions (Estes & Verges, 2008;González-Villar, Triñanes, Zurrón, & Carrillo-de-la-Peña, 2014;Herbert, Kissler, Junghöfer, Peyk, & Rockstroh, 2006), but also in experimental situations in which the emotional content was irrelevant to the task (González-Villar et al, 2014;Hinojosa, Méndez-Bértolo, & Pozo, 2010;Kousta, Vinson, & Vigliocco 2009;Schacht & Sommer, 2009;Scott, O'Donnell, & Sereno 2014).…”

“…Thanks to these normative databases, main effects of valence and arousal on word processing have been welldocumented in different languages (Kousta et al 2009;Scott et al, 2014; see also Jacobs et al, 2015, for an overview), and their electrophysiological and neuroanatomical correlates have been described (González-Villar et al, 2014;Herbert, Junghöfer, & Kissler, 2008;Hinojosa et al, 2010;Recio et al, 2014;Schacht & Sommer, 2009; see also Citron, 2012, for an overview). This research has revealed an advantage in processing for positive relative to neutral words (e.g., Bayer, Sommer, & Schacht, 2011;Kissler & Koessler, 2011;Kousta et al, 2009;Kuchinke, Võ, Hofmann, & Jacobs, 2007).…”

“…emotion and language has taken advantage of the fact that words can be characterized according to these dimensions (Bradley & Lang, 1999). Hence, studies in the field have focused on testing the effects of the valence and arousal of words with different experimental paradigms and tasks, such as the detection of meaningful words in streams of stimuli (Hinojosa et al, 2010), the lexical decision task (Citron, Weekes, & Ferstl, 2013;Kousta et al, 2009;Recio, Conrad, Hansen, & Jacobs, 2014), the affective categorization task (Estes & Verges, 2008), or the emotional Stroop task (González-Villar et al, 2014), among others.…”