Despite increased focus on emotional language, research lacks for the most emotional language: Swearing. We used event-related potentials to investigate whether swear words have content dist...

While databases of taboo language word norms exist, none focus specifically on slurs as a category of taboo language. Furthermore, no existing databases include measures of linguistic reclamation, a phenomenon which may specifically affect the processing of slurs. I produced a database in which 155 native or near-native speakers of British English rated 41 LGBTQ+ slurs for a number of word properties and measures of linguistic reclamation. I then ran correlation and demographic group comparison analyses on the resulting database. I (...) found a clear correlation pattern between properties and reclamation behaviours. I also found that there were age-related differences in age of acquisition and familiarity ratings; that gender identity and sexual identity differences were affected by being the target of slurs; and that sexual identity particularly affected differences in reclamation ratings. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of discrete emotions in lexical processing and memory, focusing on disgust and fear. We compared neutral words to disgust-related words and fear-related words in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed a lexical decision task, and in Experiment 3 an affective categorisation task. These tasks were followed by an unexpected memory task. The results of the LDT experiments showed slower reaction times for both types of negative words with (...) respect to neutral words, plus a higher percentage of errors, this being more consistent for fear-related words than for disgust-related words. Furthermore, only disgusting words exhibited a higher recall accuracy than neutral words in the memory task. Moreover, the advantage in memory for disgusting words disappeared when participants carried out an affective categorisation task during encoding, suggesting that the superiority in memory for disgusting words observed in Experiments 1 and 2 could be due to greater elaborative processing. Taken together, these findings point to the relevance of discrete emotions in explaining the effects of the emotional content on lexical processing and memory. (shrink)