Emotion in Context: How Sender Predictability and Identity Affect Processing of Words as Imminent Personality Feedback

Abstract

Recent findings suggest that communicative context affects the timing and magnitude of emotion effects in word processing. In particular, social attributions seem to be one important source of plasticity for the processing of affectively charged language. Here, we investigate the timing and magnitude of ERP responses toward positive, neutral, and negative trait adjectives during the anticipation of putative socio-evaluative feedback from different senders (human and computer) varying in predictability. In the first experiment, during word presentation participants could not anticipate whether a human or a randomly acting computer sender was about to give feedback. Here, a main effect of emotion was observed only on the late positive potential (LPP), showing larger amplitudes for positive compared to neutral adjectives. In the second study the same stimuli and set-up were used, but a block-wise presentation was realized, resulting in fixed and fully predictable sender identity. Feedback was supposedly given by an expert (psychotherapist), a layperson (unknown human), and again by a randomly acting computer. Main effects of emotion started with an increased P1 for negative adjectives, followed by effects at the N1 and early posterior negativity (EPN), showing both largest amplitudes for positive words, as well as for the LPP, where positive and negative words elicited larger amplitudes than neutral words. An interaction revealed that emotional LPP modulations occurred only for a human sender. Finally, regardless of content, anticipating human feedback led to larger P1 and P3 components, being highest for the putative expert. These findings demonstrate the malleability of emotional language processing by social contexts. When clear predictions can be made, our brains rapidly differentiate between emotional and neutral information, as well as between different senders. Attributed human presence affects emotional language processing already during feedback anticipation, in line with a selective gating of attentional resources via anticipatory social significance attributions. By contrast, emotion effects occur much later, when crucial social context information is still missing. These findings demonstrate the context-dependence of emotion effects in word processing and are particularly relevant since virtual communication with unknown senders, whose identity is inferred rather than perceived, has become reality for millions of people.

Mood Induction Differently Affects Early Neural Correlates of Evaluative Word Processing in L1 and L2

“…By contrast, emotion effects at very early temporal stages are more sporadically observed (cf., Citron, 2012 ). Studies that detected such early effects, report amplified amplitudes on P1, peaking between 80 and 120 ms (e.g., Hofmann et al, 2009 ; Scott et al, 2009 ; Bayer et al, 2012 ; Schindler et al, 2019b ), and/or on N1 between 100 and 200 ms post stimulus. They are typically valence-specific and often more pronounced for negative words (e.g., Scott et al, 2009 ; Kissler and Herbert, 2013 ; Yao et al, 2016 ; Schindler et al, 2019b ), but have also been reported selectively for positive, e.g., happiness-related words ( Briesemeister et al, 2014 ).…”

“… Scott et al (2009) further showed an interaction of emotion with word frequency on the N1 in that the N1 was larger for high- than low-frequency negative words, whereas neutral words showed the opposite frequency modulation. Addressing neural effects of attributed social contexts, Schindler et al (2019b) recently observed that valence effects on early brain potentials such as the N1 were elicited only when emotional trait adjectives were embedded in personally relevant communicative context—as a feedback personally targeted at the participant. When devoid of social embedding, the same emotional words elicited only late ERP amplifications (LPP).…”

Assessing Feedback Response With a Wearable Electroencephalography System

“…The amplitude of the P300 (P3) component has also been studied in performance monitoring research. Slightly larger P3 peaks were sometimes attributed to more positive feedback but were generally not statistically significant (Potts, 2011; Yi et al, 2018; Schindler et al, 2019; Tunison et al, 2019). One study compared a consumer-grade MUSE EEG system and the clinical-grade Brain Vision ActiChamp system and found that the FRN responses were similar in a selection task (Krigolson et al, 2017).…”

Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility

“…Both components are sensitive to verbal affective person-related information associated with faces via verbal evaluative learning (for instance, EPN: Abdel Rahman, 2011 ; Kissler and Strehlow, 2017 ; Wieser et al , 2014 ; Suess et al , 2015 ; Junghöfer et al , 2016 ; Luo et al , 2016 ; Xu et al , 2016 ; LPP: Luo et al , 2016 ; Baum et al , 2018 ). Crucially, the LPP is sensitive to additional information such as context and relevance, putting emotional contents into perspective ( Schacht and Sommer, 2009b ; Herbert et al , 2011 , 2013 ; Blechert et al , 2012 ; Rellecke et al , 2012 ; Schindler et al , 2019 ), whereas the EPN is relatively independent of task demands and the relevance of emotional contents in a given context ( Schacht and Sommer, 2009b ; Herbert et al , 2011 , 2013 ). It is noteworthy that this evidence of additional contextual influences on ERPs comes from studies testing the effects of emotional information immediately, while there is scarce evidence of such contextual effects on later consequences ( Baum et al , 2018 ).…”