Feel Thine Own Self – Mood Congruency Evaluation of Emotional State Adjectives

Abstract

Abstract. The goal of the study was to explore event-related potential (ERP) differences during the processing of emotional adjectives that were evaluated as congruent or incongruent with the current mood. We hypothesized that the first effects of congruence evaluation would be evidenced during the earliest stages of semantic analysis. Sixty mood adjectives were presented separately for 1,000 ms each during two sessions of mood induction. After each presentation, participants evaluated to what extent the word described their mood. The results pointed to incongruence marking of adjective’s meaning with current mood during early attention orientation and semantic access stages (the P150 component time window). This was followed by enhanced processing of congruent words at later stages. As a secondary goal the study also explored word valence effects and their relation to congruence evaluation. In this regard, no significant effects were observed on the ERPs; however, a negativity bias (enhanced responses to negative adjectives) was noted on the behavioral data (RTs), which could correspond to the small differences traced on the late positive potential.

Mood and gender effects in emotional word processing in unbalanced bilinguals

“…Consistent with the associative network theory (Bower, 1981), the early studies suggested that moods may be represented as distinctive nodes in semantic memory, being linked to the nodes representing mood-congruent words. Yet, later research has revealed a less consistent pattern of results (e.g., Grzybowski et al, 2021; Pratt & Kelly, 2008; Sereno et al, 2015), rarely reporting mood-congruence effects hypothesised by Bower (1981). For instance, in a lexical decision task (LDT) study, Sereno et al (2015) found that both positive and negative moods facilitated response accuracy and latencies to positive and negative words of low and high frequency compared to the baseline conditions – neutral words and no mood induction.…”