RT Journal Article
T1 Unraveling the mystery about the negative valence bias: does arousal account for processing differences in unpleasant words?
A1 Vieitez Portas, Lucía
A1 Haro Rodríguez, Juan
A1 Ferré Romeu, María del Pilar
A1 Padrón Rodríguez, Isabel
A1 Fraga Carou, Isabel
K1 Arousal
K1 Valence
K1 Lexical decision task
K1 Visual word recognition
K1 Event-related potentials (ERPs)
AB Many studies have found that the emotional content of words affects visual wordrecognition. However, most of them have only considered affective valence, findinginconsistencies regarding the direction of the effects, especially in unpleasant words.Recent studies suggest that arousal might explain why not all unpleasant words elicitthe same behavior. The aim of the present research was to study the role of arousalin unpleasant word recognition. To do that, we carried out an ERP experiment inwhich participants performed a lexical decision task that included unpleasant wordswhich could vary across three levels of arousal (intermediate, high, and very high) andwords which were neutral in valence and had an intermediate level of arousal. Resultsshowed that, within unpleasant words, those intermediate in arousal evoked smallerLPC amplitudes than words that were high or very high in arousal, indicating that arousalaffects unpleasant word recognition. Critically, arousal determined whether the effect ofnegative valence was found or not. When arousal was not matched between unpleasantand neutral valenced words, the effect of emotionality was weak in the behavioraldata and absent in the ERP data. However, when arousal was intermediate in bothunpleasant and neutral valenced words, larger EPN amplitudes were reported for theformer, pointing to an early allocation of attention. Interestingly, these unpleasant wordswhich had an intermediate level of arousal showed a subsequent inhibitory effect in thatthey evoked smaller LPC amplitudes and led to slower reaction times and more errorsthan neutral words. Our results highlight the relevance that the arousal level has for thestudy of negative valence effects in word recognition
PB MDPI
SN 1664-1078
YR 2021
FD 2021
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/27252
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/27252
LA eng
NO Vieitez, L., Haro, J., Ferré, P., Padrón, I., & Fraga, I. (2021). Unraveling the mystery about the negative valence bias: Does arousal account for processing differences in unpleasant words? Frontiers in Psychology, 0 doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.748726
NO This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PID2019-107206GB-I00 and RED2018-102615-T), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-110583GB-I00), the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Consellería de Educación, Xunta de Galicia, GRC 2015/006), and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2019PFR-URV-B2-32)
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026