Emotionality effects in Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from lab-based and web-based lexical decision tasks

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Emotional stimuli capture attention, a phenomenon explained by the motivated attention and affective states model.
• Previous research indicates emotional word content influences word recognition processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the emotionality effect on word recognition in Korean.
• To compare word recognition across lab-based and web-based environments.
• To test the language universality of the emotionality effect.

Main Methods:

• Lexical decision tasks were used to measure response times.
• Participants responded to positive, negative, and neutral Korean words.
• Experiments were conducted in both traditional lab and web-based settings.

Main Results:

• Faster response times were observed for emotion words compared to neutral words.
• This effect was consistent across both lab-based and web-based experimental environments.
• No significant difference in response times was found between the two environments.

Conclusions:

• Emotion words attract attention and facilitate word processing, even in potentially distracting online settings.
• The emotionality effect in word recognition is demonstrated in Korean, supporting its potential universality.
• Findings suggest emotionality influences cognitive processing across different languages and experimental contexts.