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Unraveling the mystery about the negative valence bias: does arousal account for processing differences in unpleasant words?
Many studies have found that the emotional content of words affects visual word
recognition. However, most of them have only considered affective valence, finding
inconsistencies regarding the direction of the effects, especially in unpleasant words.
Recent studies suggest that arousal might explain why not all unpleasant words elicit
the same behavior. The aim of the present research was to study the role of arousal
in unpleasant word recognition. To do that, we carried out an ERP experiment in
which participants performed a lexical decision task that included unpleasant words
which could vary across three levels of arousal (intermediate, high, and very high) and
words which were neutral in valence and had an intermediate level of arousal. Results
showed that, within unpleasant words, those intermediate in arousal evoked smaller
LPC amplitudes than words that were high or very high in arousal, indicating that arousal
affects unpleasant word recognition. Critically, arousal determined whether the effect of
negative valence was found or not. When arousal was not matched between unpleasant
and neutral valenced words, the effect of emotionality was weak in the behavioral
data and absent in the ERP data. However, when arousal was intermediate in both
unpleasant and neutral valenced words, larger EPN amplitudes were reported for the
former, pointing to an early allocation of attention. Interestingly, these unpleasant words
which had an intermediate level of arousal showed a subsequent inhibitory effect in that
they evoked smaller LPC amplitudes and led to slower reaction times and more errors
than neutral words. Our results highlight the relevance that the arousal level has for the
study of negative valence effects in word recognitionThis 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 (ConsellerÃa de Educación, Xunta de Galicia, GRC 2015/006), and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2019PFR-URV-B2-32)S