Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect

Abstract

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) is also involved in these processes. According to the hierarchy model, emotions are considered organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy, in which emotion prototypes are organized following affective valence. By controlling different congruencies of emotion relations (i.e., matches or mismatches between valences and prototypes of emotion), the present study showed both an evaluative congruency effect (Experiment 1) and a discrete emotional congruency effect (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that not only affective valences but also discrete emotions can be activated under the present priming lexical decision task. However, the present findings also suggest that discrete emotions might be activated at the later priming stage as compared to valences. The present work provides evidence that information about discrete emotion could be involved in word processing. This might be a result of subjects’ embodied experiences.

Felt Emotion Elicited by Music: Are Sensitivities to Various Musical Features Different for Young Children and Young Adults?

“…The "fixed meaning" in this argument means a clear correspondence between emotion and a note pattern. This could be generalized as a correspondence between emotion and its corresponding events (Chen, Liu, et al, 2016), and this correspondence can be easily accessed. For example, the word "happy" corresponds to events such as "passed the exam," "falling in love," etc.…”

“…For example, the word "happy" corresponds to events such as "passed the exam," "falling in love," etc. As a consequence, events corresponding to the concept "happy" could be easily accessed when processing the word "happy," if these events have been experienced (Chen, Liu, et al, 2016).…”

“…People build mappings between concepts, especially abstract concepts, so that they can easily learn a new concept via an old one, or categorize concepts more easily (Chen, Wang, et al, 2016). Mappings between concrete concepts are more easily built than those between abstract concepts (Chen, Liu, et al, 2016). Therefore, the connection between tempo and felt emotions might be more easily accessed than the connection between mode and felt emotions.…”

“…There is considerable research on how people access emotions through verbal information (Chen, Liu, et al, 2016;Kousta, et al, 2011;Kousta, et al, 2009) as well as nonverbal information such as facial expressions (Deliens, et al, 2018;Pell, 2005) and music (Bowman & Yamauchi, 2016;Bresin & Friberg, 2011;Juslin & Sloboda, 2013;Kawakami, et al, 2013;Zentner, et al, 2008). The term "musical emotions" refers both to the perception of the emotion that a musical piece was meant to express (i.e., perceived emotion) and the emotions induced in the person listening to the music (i.e., felt emotion) (Kawakami et al, 2013).…”

The Common Element Effect of Abstract-to-Abstract Mapping in Language Processing

“…In language processing, especially based on the amodal symbols view ( Burgess and Lund, 1997 ; Landauer and Dumais, 1997 ), robust priming effects have been widely found in conditions in which primes and targets share the same semantic or other common elements ( Plaut, 1995 ; Bi et al, 1998 ; Sun and Wang, 2012 ; Chen et al, 2016 ). One of the typical examples is the DOCTOR–NURSE word pair, in which both words belong to the same semantic network in our mental lexicon.…”