The Processing Of Chinese Emotional Words:Evidence From ERPs

Emotion and Language are two important mental activities. The emotion affect every aspect of our daily lives, and the language is the important way by which we communicate, save, learning, and Shared human knowledge of science and culture. Therefore, the relationship between emotion and language processing has become the foucus for the researchers.Language not only can express the concept of the basic information, but also express emotional information. As the basic unit of language, words not only can be summarized as to describe the objective things, but also transmit a certain emotional information. The emotional words which contain conceptual information and emotional information provides a convenient for study of the effect the emotional information has on the word processing. Therefore, the exploration of the stage characteristics of emotional influences on word’s processing and how the analysis level of the language information adjust the allocation of resources in emotional word processing are very interesting. Due to the different emotional stimuli have different brain sources, so using a millisecond timescale time of ERP technology can better reveal the emotional identification of the word, the perception and cognitive process in real time. Therefore, with ERP technologies, the study discusses the influences of emotional information on the word’s processing deeply.The implicit and explicit processing have very important impact on the processing of emotional stimuli. The emotional content of facial expressions could be code in both explicit and implicit processing. Emotional effect also could be found in both explicit and implicit processing of words. However, the attention to emotional stimuli may has different effect on early and late emotional effects. In the implicit processing of emotional stimuli, when the attention was to non-emotional informations, the LPP seems to be decreased. Therefore, with explicit (Experiment1) and implicit task (Experiment2), this present study investigate the influences of emotional information on words’processing.With the explicit emotional assessment task, Experiment1investigated the effect of emotional informations on the words’cognitive processing in explicit emotional processing. We found that, in the early stages of processing, positive words has larger PI than neutral and negative words. Emotional words elicited larger P2than neutral words. The resualts suggested that, positive words attracted more attention in the P1time window; And in P2time window, high degree of emotional arousal attracted more attention. In the late processing stage, compare with neutral words, the emotional words caused decreased N400and increased LPP. The results suggested that emotional information have promoted semantic integrations of words, and received more attention resources in the late cortical encoding processing.With the lexical decision task (i.e. implicit emotional task), Experiment2investigated the effect of emotional informations on the words’ cognitive processing in implicit emotional processing. We found that, in the early stage, the emotional words caused more larger PI and P2than for neutral words. The results suggested that in PI and P2time window, high emotional arousal words attracted more attention. In the late stage, positive words caused decreased N400than for neutral words, while the negative words triggered an increased LPP than for positive and neutral ones. The results showed that, compared with neutral words, positive words promoted the semantic integration of words; and In late cortical encoding, negative words attracted more attentional resource, which showed the negative information processing bias.The results of the study showed that, whether explicit or implicit task, the emotional information has impact on early and late stages in words’ processing. In addition, the needing of the task has different impact on the emotional effects. In the early stage, the PI emotional effect was modulated by task needing, while P2was task-independed. In late stage, the emotional effects will be subject to the influence of the task.