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Loser! On the combined impact of emotional and person‐descriptive word meanings in communicative situations
Author(s) -
Rohr Lana,
Abdel Rahman Rasha
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
psychophysiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.661
H-Index - 156
eISSN - 1469-8986
pISSN - 0048-5772
DOI - 10.1111/psyp.13067
Subject(s) - psychology , relevance (law) , parallels , reading (process) , meaning (existential) , cognitive psychology , word (group theory) , social psychology , linguistics , law , psychotherapist , engineering , mechanical engineering , philosophy , political science
Humans have a unique capacity to induce intense emotional states in others by simple acts of verbal communication, and simple messages such as bad can elicit strong emotions in the addressee. However, up to now, research has mainly focused on general emotional meaning aspects and paradigms of low personal relevance (e.g., word reading), thereby possibly underestimating the impact of verbal emotion. In the present study, we recorded ERPs while presenting emotional words differing in word‐inherent person descriptiveness (in that they may or may not refer to or describe a person; e.g., winner vs. sunflower). We predicted stronger emotional responses to person‐descriptive words. Additionally, we enhanced the relevance of the words by embedding them in social‐communicative contexts. We observed strong parallels in the characteristics of emotion and descriptiveness effects, suggesting a common underlying motivational basis. Furthermore, word‐inherent person descriptiveness affected emotion processing at late elaborate stages reflected in the late positive potential, with emotion effects found only for descriptive words. The present findings underline the importance of factors determining the personal relevance of emotional words.