An Eye Movement Study On The Influence Of Different Types Of Emotional Words On Reading Processing

Emotional information is inseparable in people's real life.Research on emotion which is widely applied,has attracted the attention of more and more researchers.Among various emotional stimuli,emotional words as a kind of special words,which attract extensive attention of researchers,can be benefit to study the influence of emotional information on language processing.The results of research on emotional words are different.Some researchers support the advantages of processing positive words versus neutral words,others support the advantages of processing negative words versus neutral words.There is also controversy between the processing of positive and negative words.Recently,more and more researchers argued that classifying emotional words into emotion-label words and emotion-laden words is important,and they should be studied separately.In this study,the emotional words are strictly divided into emotion-label words and emotion-laden words,which are compared in two experiments.The two types of emotional words are studied in lexical decision task and sentence reading separately to explore whether they differs in processing.2(emotion words: emotion-label words,emotion-laden words)× 2(valence: positive,negative)× 2(congruency: congruent,incongruent)repeated-measures analysis of variance experimental design is used in Experiment 1 to explore the impact of two types of emotional words on Affective Simon effect.The independent variables are two types of emotional words,two valences,and the congruency between tasks and responses.The dependent variable is response time.It is found that both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words produce significant Affective Simon effects.And the effects in size are not different between emotion label-words and emotion-laden words.It shows that the emotional congruency effects produced by emotional words has been verified in both emotion-label words and emotion-laden words.2(emotion words: emotion-label words,emotion-laden words)× 3(valence: positive,negative,neutral)repeated-measures analysis of variance experimental design is used in Experiment 2,which make use of eye movement technology to explore whether the speed of two types of emotional words in reading processing is different.The independent variables are two types of emotional words and three different valences.The dependent variables included single fixation duration,first fixation duration,gaze duration,regression path reading time,total fixation duration and reading speed.The results show that the difference between positive and neutral emotion-laden words is significant in single fixation duration,first fixation duration,gaze duration,and regression path reading time,indicating processing advantage of positive relative to neutral emotion-laden words.In first fixation duration and regression path reading time,there is a significant difference between positive and negative emotion-laden words,indicating processing advantage of positive relative to negative emotion-laden words.To some extent,it has verified and improved the theory of attention composition,attention resource,PDP model and automatically alert model,and supported the viewpoint of the embodied account of semantic representation.The results show that the there is no significant difference between the processing of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in vocabulary reading.There are significant differences between the processing of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words in sentence reading.