The negativity bias is encoded in language

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Information Theory

Background:

• Emotional valence influences cognitive processes.
• Linguistic features, such as phonemic structure, can impact memory.
• Shannon's information quantifies predictability in sequences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the link between emotional word valence, phonemic surprisal, and memory performance.
• To determine if negative words possess greater information content than neutral or positive words.
• To assess the association between information content and memory recognition accuracy.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of emotional valence and phonemic bigram surprisal in American English words.
• Utilizing an existing memory recognition experiment.
• Measuring hit rates and d' scores as indicators of memory performance.

Main Results:

• Negative words exhibit higher Shannon's information (phonemic surprisal) compared to neutral or positive words.
• Increased phonemic information within words is linked to enhanced memory performance.
• Negative words with high surprisal significantly increased hit rates and d' scores in memory recognition.

Conclusions:

• Emotional valence and linguistic information interact to influence memory.
• Higher information content, particularly in negative words, improves memory recognition.
• Findings contribute to understanding language structure's role in cognition and memory.