Abstract

Rapid responses to emotional words play a crucial role in social communication. This study employed event-related potentials to examine the time course of neural dynamics involved in emotional word processing. Participants performed a dual-target task in which positive, negative and neutral adjectives were rapidly presented. The early occipital P1 was found larger when elicited by negative words, indicating that the first stage of emotional word processing mainly differentiates between non-threatening and potentially threatening information. The N170 and the early posterior negativity were larger for positive and negative words, reflecting the emotional/non-emotional discrimination stage of word processing. The late positive component not only distinguished emotional words from neutral words, but also differentiated between positive and negative words. This represents the third stage of emotional word processing, the emotion separation. Present results indicated that, similar with the three-stage model of facial expression processing; the neural processing of emotional words can also be divided into three stages. These findings prompt us to believe that the nature of emotion can be analyzed by the brain independent of stimulus type, and that the three-stage scheme may be a common model for emotional information processing in the context of limited attentional resources.

Details

Title
Three stages of emotional word processing: an ERP study with rapid serial visual presentation
Author
Zhang, Dandan 1 ; He, Weiqi 1 ; Wang, Ting 1 ; Luo, Wenbo 2 ; Zhu, Xiangru 1 ; Gu, Ruolei 1 ; Li, Hong 1 ; Yue-jia, Luo 1 

 Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, 2 School of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, 3 Laboratory of Cognition and Mental Health, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences, Chongqing 402168, 4 Department of Psychology, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, and 5 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People’s Republic of China 
 Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, 2 School of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, 3 Laboratory of Cognition and Mental Health, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences, Chongqing 402168, 4 Department of Psychology, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, and 5 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People’s Republic of China; Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, 2 School of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, 3 Laboratory of Cognition and Mental Health, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences, Chongqing 402168, 4 Department of Psychology, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, and 5 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, People’s Republic of China 
Pages
1897-1903
Publication year
2014
Publication date
Dec 2014
Publisher
Oxford University Press
ISSN
17495016
e-ISSN
17495024
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3171562169
Copyright
© The Author(s) (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.