跳至主要内容

Effects of Emotional State on Processing Conceptual Mismatches

In several fields of psychology, it has been shown that a participant’s background emotional state influences how information is processed. Emotional state, also referred to as mood, refers to a long-term psychological state. And some studies event-related potential (ERP) studies have demonstrated that emotional state immediately affects the processing of different linguistic mismatches (e.g., semantic and syntactic mismatches) in sentences. Furthermore, mood has been shown to impact discourse processing. In these studies, a strong expectancy was evoked by a linguistic context.

In the present study, a strong expectancy was induced by a visual (non-linguistic) context paired with a sentence. A spatial array was followed by a sentence that matched (□○—The square stands in front of the circle) or mismatched the picture (intra-dimensional mismatch: □○—The square stands behind the circle; extra-dimensional mismatch: □○—The square stands above the circle). The main question was whether mood effects on the processing of visually induced expectancies were similar or different from mood effects on the processing of linguistically induced expectancies. To this aim, the authors presented conceptual (mis)matches that differed in saliency: intra-dimensional vs. extra-dimensional mismatches which are both reported to elicit an N2b/N400 (a negative slow wave that peaks at around 400 ms following word onset) and P600 (a positive slow shift starting around 500 ms and typically extending up to 800 ms after word onset), reflecting reanalysis. EEG was recorded while participants read for comprehension. Mood (happy vs. sad) was effectively induced by film clips. Neither for N2b/N400 nor for P600, an interaction between mood and match was observed.

Thus, in contrast with studies investigating the effects of pure linguistic mismatches (linguistic context paired with unexpected lexical item), mood did not modulate the processing of conceptual mismatches. However, a main effect of match revealed different ERP patterns for the two mismatches. While an increase in N2b/ N400 occurred for the intra-dimensional and extra-dimensional mismatches, a P600 only occurred to the extra-dimensional (more salient) mismatches.

In conclusion, the effect of a happy mood versus a sad mood on language processing of linguistic mismatches does not generalize to the processing of conceptual mismatches. The finding can be taken as support that being in an emotional state (positive or negative mood) influences processes of reanalysis. That is, when being in an emotional state, a reanalysis (monitoring) process is exclusively triggered by salient mismatches.

Article by Randi I. Goertz, et al, from the Netherlands and Belgium.

Full access: http://mrw.so/1Sscep
Image by lhwilkinson, from Flickr-cc.


评论

发表评论

此博客中的热门博文

Does Immigration Promote the Investment of the Monopolistic Firm?

In the present paper, we examine the effect of increasing uncertainty of immigrants’ growth on the optimal timing of investment of a firm that has a monopolistic power over the labor market. It is revealed that when the uncertainty of immigrants’ growth is more than a threshold level, increasing uncertainty of immigrants’ growth accelerates the optimal timing of firms’ investment and enhances the economic growth, even if the uncertainty of immigrants’ growth is formulated by the geometric Brownian motion, which is in sharp contrast to the standard result that an increase in the uncertainty postpones the optimal timing. With an increase in the immigrants over the past ten years, workforces in the host countries have been growing significantly to the extent that the immigrants represent 70% of the increase in the workforce in Europe, and 47% in the United States as OECD indicates. In the present paper, we attempted to investigate the effect of increased uncertainty caused by the growi...
发表评论
阅读全文

Education Policy Implementation: A Mechanism for Enhancing Primary Education Development in Zanzibar

Education is one of the fundamental rights of individuals; therefore, the government of a country needs to develop and strengthen educational policy and quality as well as to ensure that everyone has equal access to basic education. The improvement of access and quality of education in the world is becoming as an essential factor in development, whereas the basic education (primary school), is acknowledged as a foundation of the higher educational development for every country. To fulfill this goal, governments introduce several policies and procedures; however, it requires some reforms and participation from the politician, policymakers, and other stakeholders to re-examine educational policy so that it can lead to multiplication and betterment of the reforms. Educational reforms actually focus on accountability. A positive educational development and reform is very challenging and needs more effort and strategy on how to use and utilize the resources effectively as such it can achie...
发表评论
阅读全文