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Effects of Dispositional Affect on the N400: Language Processing and Socially Situated Context
Veena D Dwivedi1, Janahan Selvanayagam2
1Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada.
Frontiers in Psychology
|April 19, 2021
Summary
Individual differences in negative affect influence how the brain processes sentence meaning. Lower negative affect correlates with stronger brain responses to semantic incongruity during language comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Affective Science
Background:
- The N400 event-related potential (ERP) component reflects semantic processing during language comprehension.
- Previous research indicates that induced mood states (positive or negative) differentially modulate N400 effects.
- Dispositional affect, or stable individual differences in emotionality, has not been extensively studied in relation to N400 modulation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether dispositional affect, specifically measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), modulates N400 effects during sentence processing.
- To determine if individual differences in negative affect influence sensitivity to semantic incongruity in real-time language comprehension.
Main Methods:
- Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record event-related potentials (ERPs) from 33 participants.
- Participants read sentences with either congruent or incongruent direct objects, preceded by definite or demonstrative determiners.
- Individual differences in dispositional affect were assessed using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).
Main Results:
- Significant N400 effects were observed, particularly in response to incongruent direct objects (e.g., '#roof' vs. 'wine').
- Larger N400 amplitude differences between congruent and incongruent conditions were associated with lower scores on the negative affect (NA) scale of the PANAS.
- These findings partially replicate previous studies showing mood-related N400 modulation.
Conclusions:
- Dispositional negative affect plays a role in modulating the N400 component during sentence comprehension.
- Lower levels of negative affect may be associated with stronger lexico-semantic processing, potentially due to enhanced local inhibition.
- These results support models of language processing that integrate individual social and biological characteristics.
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