Differential Emotional Processing in Concrete and Abstract Words

Autor/inn/en	Yao, Bo; Keitel, Anne; Bruce, Gillian; Scott, Graham G.; O'Donnell, Patrick J.; Sereno, Sara C.
Titel	Differential Emotional Processing in Concrete and Abstract Words
Quelle	In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44 (2018) 7, S.1064-1074 (11 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0278-7393
DOI	10.1037/xlm0000464
Schlagwörter	Psycholinguistics; Emotional Response; Language Processing; Language Usage; Lexicology; Word Recognition; Adults; Experiments; Statistical Analysis; Likert Scales; Imagery + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Psycholinguistik; Emotionales Verhalten; Sprachverarbeitung; Sprachgebrauch; Lexikologie; Worterkennung; Erprobung; Statistische Analyse; Likert-Skala; Metaphorik
Abstract	Emotion (positive and negative) words are typically recognized faster than neutral words. Recent research suggests that emotional valence, while often treated as a unitary semantic property, may be differentially represented in concrete and abstract words. Studies that have explicitly examined the interaction of emotion and concreteness, however, have demonstrated inconsistent patterns of results. Moreover, these findings may be limited as certain key lexical variables (e.g., familiarity, age of acquisition) were not taken into account. We investigated the emotion-concreteness interaction in a large-scale, highly controlled lexical decision experiment. A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) × 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) design was used, with 45 items per condition and 127 participants. We found a significant interaction between emotion and concreteness. Although positive and negative valenced words were recognized faster than neutral words, this emotion advantage was significantly larger in concrete than in abstract words. We explored potential contributions of participant alexithymia level and item imageability to this interactive pattern. We found that only word imageability significantly modulated the emotion-concreteness interaction. While both concrete and abstract emotion words are advantageously processed relative to comparable neutral words, the mechanisms of this facilitation are paradoxically more dependent on imageability in abstract words. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01