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

Previous studies have shown that processes of word recognition are influenced by the emotional content of a word. This pattern is most readily explained by the motivated attention and affective states model (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997), which states that emotional stimuli are motivationally significant and capture attention. Drawing on this theoretical account, the current study compared lexical decision response times to positive and negative emotion words versus neutral words across two experimental environments - a traditional lab-based environment and a web-based environment. In addition, the experiment was conducted using Korean words presented to native Korean speakers in order to test whether the emotionality effect emerges in a non-English language. The results revealed faster response times to emotion words versus neutral words across both experimental environments with no evidence of a difference between the two environments. These findings provide important evidence that emotion words successfully attract attention and facilitate word processing even in situations where participants might be more easily distracted than they would be in a traditional lab setting. This work also constitutes the first demonstration of an emotionality effect in Korean word recognition, thus providing further evidence that the emotionality effect may be a language-universal phenomenon.