Event-related potential studies of language and emotion: words, phrases, and task effects

This chapter reviews research that focuses on the effects of emotionality of single words, and of simple phrases, on event-related brain potentials when these are presented visually in various tasks. In these studies, presentation of emotionally evocative language material has consistently elicited a late (c. 300-600 ms post-onset) positive-going, largely frontal-central shift in the event-related potentials (ERPs), relative to neutral materials. Overall, affectively pleasant and unpleasant words or phrases are quite similar in their neuroelectric profiles and rarely differ substantively. This emotionality effect is enhanced in both amplitude and latency when emotional content is task relevant, but is also reliably observed when the task involves other semantically engaging tasks. On the other hand, it can be attenuated or eliminated when the task does not involve semantic evaluation (e.g., lexical decisions to words or orthographic judgments to the spelling patterns) or when comprehension of phrases requires integration of the connotative meaning of several words (e.g., compare dead puppy and dead tyrant). Taken together, these studies suggest that the emotionality of written language has a rapid and robust impact on ERPs, which can be modulated by specific task demands as well as the linguistic context in which the affective stimulus occurs.