Affective aspects of a stimulus can be processed rapidly and before cognitive attribution, acting much earlier for verbal stimuli than previously considered. Aimed for specific mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), expressed in facial expressions or word meaning and evoked by six basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, and surprise – relative to emotionally neutral stimuli were analysed in a sample of 116 participants. Brain responses in the occipital and left temporal regions elicited by the sadness in facial expressions (...) or words were indistinguishable from responses evoked by neutral faces or words. Confirming previous findings, facial fear elicited an early and strong posterior negativity. Instead of expected parietal positivity, both the happy faces and words produced significantly more negative responses compared to neutral. Surprise in facial expressions and words elicited a strong early response in the left temporal cortex, which could be a signature of appraisal. The results of this study are consistent with the view that both types of affective stimuli, facial emotions and word meaning, set off rapid processing and responses occur very early in the processing stage. (shrink)

There has been no consensus on the neural dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words, which remains one of the major concerns in affective neurolinguistics. The current study adopted dot-probe tasks to investigate the valence effect on attentional bias toward Chinese emotion-label and emotion-laden words. Behavioral data showed that emotional word type and valence interacted in attentional bias scores with an attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words rather than positive emotion-label words and that this bias was derived from the disengagement difficulty (...) in positive emotion-laden words. In addition, an attentional bias toward negative emotion-label words relative to positive emotion-label words was observed. The event-related potential data demonstrated an interaction between emotional word type, valence, and hemisphere. A significant hemisphere effect was observed during the processing of positive emotion-laden word pairs rather than positive emotion-label, negative emotion-label, and negative emotion-laden word pairs, with positive emotion-laden word pairs eliciting an enhanced P1 in the right hemisphere as compared to the left hemisphere. Our results found a dynamic attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words; individuals allocated more attention to positive emotion-laden words in the early processing stage and had difficulty disengaging attention from them in the late processing stage. (shrink)