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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:3 (2017) ► pp.283–308

Effects of emotion information on processing pain-related words in visual word recognition

| University of Northern British Columbia
| University of Northern British Columbia
| University of Northern British Columbia
| University of Northern British Columbia
| University of Calgary
| University of Northern British Columbia

We examined the effects of emotion information (valence, arousal, and emotional experience) on lexical decision and semantic categorization (using a “Is the word pain-related or not?” decision criterion) performance for pain-related words. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we observed facilitatory effects of emotional experience in both tasks, such that faster responses were associated with higher emotional experience ratings. We observed a marginally significant valence effect in the semantic categorization task, such that faster responses were associated with more unpleasantness ratings. These effects were observed even with several other predictor variables (e.g., frequency, age of acquisition, concreteness, physical pain experience ratings) included in the analyses. These results suggest that the dimensions of emotional experience and (to a lesser degree) valence underlie emotion conceptual knowledge of pain-related words; however, their influence appears to be dynamic, depending on task demands.

Keywords: visual word recognition, grounded cognition, lexical-semantic representation, emotion knowledge, valence, arousal, emotional experience
Article outline
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Stimuli
    • Apparatus and procedure
    • Data analysis
  • Results and discussion
    • Lexical decision task
    • Semantic categorization task
  • General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 16 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17001.sia
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