Specific Effects Of Emotional Nouns: From An Erp Study

In recent years, on the interrelations between emotions and languages has gradually become the focus for the researchers. Along with our lives, emotions are the major part of dynamic mechanism in the mental activities. While as one of the most important human cognitive activities, language is the important information carrier. Then what kind of impact will the emotional information carried by the language itself exert on the language processing? How will the semantic concept influence the emotional perception?As a kind of special vocabulary, emotional words have facilitated the study of emotional information's influences on the lexical processing. The study shows that the processing advantages of emotional words predominate when comparing with the neutral words. In the same way, word's concreteness is an important variation that influences the processing of semantic. A large number of researches about concreteness of words indicate that the processing in words with concrete concept is faster and more accurate than that in words with abstract concept. Therefore, we can assume that the emotionality and concreteness of words may be the different factors that affect semantic processing. So how do the "emotionality brain" and "language brain" influence each other? How are the emotionality and concreteness of words related and how do they influence the processing of words? So far the relationship between emotionality and concreteness of words has not been clear, and the related studies on their relationship are seldom seen.Consequently, this research is going to probe into the relationship between emotion and semantic processing by using the ERP that has excellent time location abilities. For the reason that we can directly study the relationship between emotionality and concreteness of words, this research for the first time combines emotional words with concreteness of words in traditional sense and divides emotional words into concrete words and abstract words of emotion. And carry out the study by adopting the idea of combining the implicit emotion with explicit emotion. Research I explores the electrophysiological characteristics of positive words, negative words and neutral words in the lexical decision task(task of implicit emotion). Reveal the impact from implicit emotionality of words on processing of concreteness of words, examine whether concrete effect exists in the emtional words, and preliminarily conclude the relationship between emotionality and concreteness. In contrast with ResearchⅠ, ResearchⅡemploys affective rating task(task of explicit emotion). Namely, how will emotionality of words influence concreteness when affective rating of words is processed in varying degrees. Finally, the ERPs in finishing two kinds of tasks by the notes and contrasts not only proves the concrete effect of emotioanl words, but also reveals the impact that emotionality makes on concreteness of words and probe into the relationship between the two.The results show that (1) emotional words all have the concreteness effect in the task of implicit emotion and explicit emotion. Concrete words of emotion have the advantage in processing over the abstract words of emotion. (2) The concreteness effect and differences in latent period of N400 in the task of implicit emotion and explicit emotion indicate that processing of concreteness of words takes priority over emotionality processing and emotionality can promote the processing of concreteness. (3) Emotionality and concreteness may be independent or mutually affect the processing of words. In a sense, emotionality and concreteness in the stage of semantic processing are the same in function and can provide context for understanding the words. (4) Emotionality of words contributes to understanding abstract words, probably because that emotionality has activated individual relevant emotional events or emotional scenes and provide the mentality representation for understanding of abstract words. (5) This research does not find out the hemisphere difference in emotionality and concreteness of words. It is probably due to that the word itself selected in the research has certain characteristic and emotionality and concreteness of words are included at the same time. It is generally believed that emotionality of words has the advantage of processing in right hemisphere, concreteness also has the hypothesis of right hemisphere advantage, but its processing depends on the verbal system of left hemisphere as far as the word itself is concerned. Advantages of hemispheres with these different attributes in the experiment may cancel out each other.In conclusion, based on the former study on emtional words and concrete words, this research is going to try to divide emotioanl nouns in dimension of word "concrete-abstract". The results prove that emotioanl words also have concrete effect, processing of concreteness of words takes priority over processing of emotionality, emotionality can promote the processing of concreteness, and the two may be independent or mutually affect the processing of words. In addition, this research finds that the influence from emotionality on processing of words only occurs in a given task, and its potential mechanism is yet to be further studied.