Behavioral And ERP Study Of Emotional Words Processing In Self-related/Unrelated Affirmation And Negation Sentences

Currently, in order to have better ecological validity, psychologists research the emotional words that be put into sentences. And linguist Lu Shu xiang said:"a sentence, from the form, which is either affirmative or negative." Therefore, from the form, sentences have been classified as two categories:affirmative and negative. In addition, the study shows that cognitive processing of self-related and self-unrelated are different. Therefore, from the content, sentences have been classified as two categories:self-unrelated and self-related. From the two dimensions:sentences form (affirmative and negative sentences) and sentence content (self-unrelated and self-related), present study research different emotional valence word about processing features and neural mechanisms by the ERP technique.In the first experiment with self-unrelated, the main findings:1. the emotional words in affirmative and negative sentences were processed through two stages. The early stage was to discriminate the affective value of the words, which happened in the first50ms time window of words presentation; while the late stage would integrate the affective meaning into the sentence, which happened around400ms since the words were presented.2. The evidences from the ERP results suggested that negative sentences presented the difference of affective information in frontal-center lobe; whereas affirmative sentences presented the difference in center-parietal lobe.In the second and third experiment with self-related, the main findings:1. when present self-reference task by affirmative sentence, emotional negative bias and self positive bias appeared in the processing of emotional words. And emotional negative bias effect on the self positive bias, that show:in accord with self, P200amplitude showed self positive bias is enhanced by emotional negative bias; in un-accord with self, P200amplitude showed self positive bias is weakened by emotional negative bias effects.2. When present self-reference task by negative sentence, it appeared self positive bias effect, and not emotional negative bias effect.Synthesizing these three experiments, the research can get following conclusions:1.Regardless of whether the sentences content is self-related or self-unrelated, compared with the affirmative, negative sentences make emotional negative bias effect weaken in the processing of emotional words.2. In self-related sentence, compared with the affirmative sentence, negative sentence indirectly affect self positive bias effect by weakening the emotional negative bias effect.