Comparative Study Of Emotional Word Processing In Single And Sentence Context

In recent years, as a representative area of the emotional language research, emotionalword processing in speciifc situations and contexts has been the focus of psychologicallinguists. Already large number of studies has been done to give in-depth analysis on theprocessing of emotional words in different contexts, such as the studies of single emotionalword processing and emotional word processing in the sentence context. However, thedifferent characteirstics in lexical processing that contained emotional information underdifferent contexts and situations have been rarely discussed so far. On the basis of theconstruction of sentence context in which some specific semantic content existed, this studyattempted to analyze and compare the emotional lexical processing characteirstics in singlepresentation and sentence context directly, meanwhile with the combination of gender and theexpeirmental task factors.With single emotional words presentation in Expeirment1，we found that: First, therewas a significant interaction between factors of the word valence and the type of expeirmentaltask, the expeirmental tasks had worked effectively on word valence effect. Compared to thesemantic judgment task, the effects of emotional word valence turned out to be moresignificant in emotional judgment task, and thus emotional word processing results in singlepresentation had been proved to support the views of non-automatic processing ornon-completely automatic processing; Secondly，due to the use of the expeirmental tasks andexpeirmental mateirals, results of the comparison within the self-semantic judgment showedthat positive and negative conditions differed signiifcantly when subjects tired to agree withthe word descriptions: reaction times duirng positive self-compliance conditions should besigniifcantly shorter than the negative self-compliance conditions, there self-positive biaseffect appeared.With emotional word presented in speciifc sentence context in Expeirment2, we foundthat: First of all, differing rfom the Expeirment1，although the main effect of task type andword valence was both found in the context of sentence, there was no task effect of emotionalword. Secondly, results of compairson within self-semantic judgment also showed thatself-positive bias effect had been found in sentence context as the same as in Expeirment1，so this phenomenon was proved to be relatively stable in different contexts or situationswhich were related to self-semantic. Again, in this context of sentence, emotional word processing under different conditions in male subjects were showed significantly faster thanfemale, gender difference in emotional information processing duirng this situation had beenfound.According to the findings of the above two experiments, we get conclusions as below: onthe one hand, due to the regulations from expeirmental tasks, the word valence effect inemotional lexical processing performs significantly different between the two situations orcontexts; On the other hand, as compared to single word presentation，emotional wordprocessing in sentence context turns out to be facilitated and promoted by the sentencecontext itself, thus context effect has appeared. In addition，there are signiifcant genderdifferences in emotional word processing duirng different contexts or situations，emotionalinformation processing in men is more dependent on semantic clues, while women tend to usemore emotional clues.