[The influence of semantic richness on the visual recognition of emotional words]

The aim of this study was to expand our knowledge of the influence of emotional valence on visual word recognition by answering two questions. The first was to examine whether the emotional valence effect is sensitive to different types of task requirements, and the second was to examine whether words polysemy can modulate the effect of emotional valence. For this purpose, we manipulated orthogonally emotional valence (negative, positive and neutral words) and polysemy (polysemous vs. non polysemous words) in two versions of the lexical-decision task (one with legal nonwords and one with illegal nonwords). Results showed an effect of task: emotional valence and polysemy influenced lexical decision latencies only in the legal version of the lexical-decision task. Furthermore, results showed that the effect of polysemy was dependant on emotional valence. We observed a facilitation of polysemy for neutral words but not for emotional ones. Finally this experiment also showed that polysemy modulates the emotional valence effect. The facilitation observed for non polysemous emotional words compared to non polysemous neutral words disappeared for polysemous words. These findings fit with other studies showing facilitation for emotional word recognition and allow conclusions concerning the role of semantics on emotional word recognition.