Where are emotions in words? Functional localization of valence effects in visual word recognition

Although emotional processing in words became a strong focus of research recently, less attention was given to the question of functional localization of emotion effects in the stream of visual word recognition directly. Here, the impact of emotional connotation of words on different processing stages of reading (pre-lexical, lexical, or semantic) is investigated. Or put alternatively: How is emotional valence represented within the linguistic representational system? From a psycholinguistic perspective there are at least two types of linguistic representations which are central to visual word recognition. These are lexical and semantic representations. It is a challenging endeavor to define the term lexical: Whether low-level lexical representations (pure orthographic processing or the visual word form) should be differentiated from higher-level lexical representations (denoting, e.g., word frequency), is for example an open issue. Furthermore, orthographic processing may comprise sublexical processing on the level of letters and syllables, and lexical processing on the level of the complete word form. The term semantic commonly refers to the meaning of words, presumed as internally represented concepts made of smaller elements of meaning organized by semantic similarity. In psycholinguistics separate lexical and semantic representations are presumed. Accordingly, most models of visual word recognition assume that lexical representations are retrieved (lexical access) after basic low-level visual perception of line forms and colors, which then culminate in activation of semantic knowledge. Models of word recognition differ with respect to their assumptions about discreteness of the processing stages and to mechanisms of accessing the lexical and semantic representations. While early models of visual word recognition postulated discrete processing stages (e.g., Forster, 1976) more recent computational approaches (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001) assume interactive processing stages organized in a cascaded manner. To my knowledge, there is no single visual word recognition model though simulating both lexical and semantic effects. Thus, emotional valence seems an interesting factor, since there is an ongoing debate about whether it should be understood as a lexical or as a semantic factor. Insights into the linguistic representations related to emotional valence would deliver important implications for visual word recognition models in general. For comparison of the time course of emotion effects and visual word recognition the prominent event-related potential (ERP) components in visual word processing should first be considered irrespective of emotion. Higher-level lexical representation effects (e.g., of word frequency) are observed already 100-ms post-stimulus. Since word frequency is broadly accepted to be a lexical factor, such modulations imply that lexical access is underway already starting in the time course of the P1 (Assadollahi and Pulvermüller, 2003; Hauk et al., 2006; Palazova et al., 2011). Earliest effects reported for semantic factors start at 160 ms (Hauk et al., 2012). Nevertheless, a more conservative view on word recognition postulates a timeline of 150 ms for pre-lexical and low-level lexical processing, at 250 ms for lexical and at 400 ms for semantic access (e.g., Grainger and Holcomb, 2009). Such results have some very important implications for the understanding of word recognition processes: (i) there seems to be a certain variability of onsets of separate linguistic processing stages in time, and (ii) the early effects may also indicate feedback mechanisms even on sublexical/low-level lexical processing stages (Carreiras et al., 2014). A current proposal is pointing to a possible key role of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex regarding feedback mechanisms in reading (Price and Devlin, 2011). Most models of word recognition, however, assume at least in very early processing stages a feedforward mechanism without any feedback from high-level to very early processing stages. Dimensional models of emotion have a long tradition in psychology and are among the most influential theories of emotion processing. These models suggest two main dimensions that describe the emotional space – (i) emotional valence denotes whether a stimulus is being perceived and experienced as positive or negative, and (ii) arousal constitutes the intensity of the appraisal process. I will limit the article to discussion of valence effects which can be understood as the dimension that underlies the quality of emotional experience. Considering the time course of emotional valence effects three different components of the ERP were observed with words. Very early emotion effects have been observed in the time course of P1 (Bernat et al., 2001; Hofmann et al., 2009; Bayer et al., 2012) or N1 (Kissler and Herbert, 2013) presumably reflecting activation of visual cortex.