Effects of Dispositional Affect on the N400: Language Processing and Socially Situated Context

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Veena D. Dwivedi¹  Janahan Selvanayagam² 

[1] Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience, Brock University;Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Western Ontario

关键词: N400;    dispositional affect;    conceptual semantics;    sentence comprehension;    mood/emotion;    global-local;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.566894

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

We examined whether the N400 Event-Related Potential (ERP) component would be modulated by dispositional affect during sentence processing. In this study, 33 participants read sentences manipulated by direct object type (congruent vs. incongruent) and object determiner type (definite vs. demonstrative). We were particularly interested in sentences of the form: (i) The connoisseur tasted thewineon the tour vs. (ii) The connoisseur tasted the #roof… We expected that processing incongruent direct objects (# roof ) vs. congruent objects ( wine ) would elicit N400 effects. Previous ERP language experiments have shown that participants in (induced) positive and negative moods were differentially sensitive to semantic anomaly, resulting in different N400 effects. Presently, we ask whether individual dispositional affect scores (as measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; PANAS) would modulate N400 effects as shown previously. Namely, previous results showed larger N400 effects associated with happy moods and attenuated amplitudes associated with sad moods. Results revealed significant N400 effects, driven by the #roof vs. the wine , where larger amplitude differences were found for individuals showing smaller negative affect (NA) scores, thus partially replicating previous findings. We discuss our results in terms of theories of local (lexical) inhibition, such that low NA promotes stronger lexico-semantic links in sentences. Finally, our results support accounts of language processing that include social and biological characteristics of individuals during real-time sentence comprehension.

【 授权许可】

CC BY