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Valence effects on visual word recognition as a function of concreteness and emotion word type
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Poster B24 in Poster Session B, Tuesday, October 24, 3:30 - 5:15 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Orna Peleg1, Aya Meltzer-Asscher1, Yaron Felman1; 1Tel Aviv University
The emotional valence associated with individual words (i.e., the extent to which the emotion evoked by a word is positive or negative) has emerged as an important variable in visual word recognition. Yet, the precise nature of these emotional effects remains unclear. This lack of clarity may be related to the fact that although valence tends to interact with other properties of the word, such as concreteness (e.g., Kanske & Kotz, 2007) and emotion word type (e.g., Zhang et al., 2017), these factors are usually studied separately. To get a more accurate picture, we conducted a lexical decision experiment, in which the target words were carefully selected to differ with respect to valence (positive, negative or neutral words), concreteness (concrete or abstract words) and type of emotional word (emotion-label or emotion-laden words), whilst being matched with respect to arousal, frequency, familiarity, and length. Under these controlled conditions, we found that positive words were easier to identify than negative or neutral words, and that this positivity advantage was more pronounced in abstract than in concrete words. Moreover, within the group of abstract words, emotion-label words were recognized faster than emotion-laden words, and this word type effect was more pronounced in negative than in positive words. These results can be interpreted in the framework of embodied theories, which emphasize the important role of emotional experience in comprehending abstract concepts (e.g., Vigllioco et al., 2014, Borghi et al., 2017).
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Reading