Influence of emotional context on concreteness effects in words processing for field-independent and field-dependent...

The phenomenon that concrete words are easier to process than abstract words is referred to as the word concreteness effect. Previous research has investigated influences of semantic context and word emotionality on concreteness effects. It is still unclear whether word concreteness effects might be influenced by emotional context for individuals with different cognitive styles. The present study showed how affective congruency between picture context and word target impacts concreteness effects in the word processing for field-independent and field-dependent individuals using event-related potential measures. The participants evaluated pleasantness of the target word following the presentation of an affective picture. Concrete words were associated with a larger N400 and a smaller late positive component (LPC) than abstract words. Moreover, the LPC concreteness effect occurred only in the affectively incongruent context for field-dependent participants. These findings suggest that emotional context and concreteness modulate the N400 independently, but the LPC concreteness effect is influenced by emotional context and cognitive style.