The Effects of Trait Anxiety and Emotional Word Type on the Processing of Chinese Words: An ERP Study

The dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words has been investigated in both behavioral and electrophysiological studies. However, how individual differences modulates the processing of emotional words has not been fully explored. Trait anxiety, as an important individual difference variable, plays a vital role in emotion processing, and may influence the processing of emotional words. To reveal the effects of trait anxiety and emotional word type on the processing of Chinese words, the present study adopted a lexical decision task (LDT) and event-related potential (ERP) technique to collect the behavioral and electrophysiological data from high-trait-anxious (HTA), medium-trait-anxious (MTA) and low-trait-anxious (LTA) individuals. Behaviorally, participants demonstrated longer reaction times (RTs) and lower accuracy (ACC) when processing emotion-laden words, as opposed to emotion-label words and neutral words. Electrophysiologically, both emotion-label and emotion-laden words induced enhanced N170 amplitudes relative to neutral ones. Compared with neutral words, emotion-laden words elicited larger early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitudes in the right hemisphere and increased late positive component (LPC) amplitudes, whereas emotion-label words elicited a stronger N400. EPN amplitudes were modulated by the interaction between trait anxiety and emotional word type. In HTA individuals, emotion-laden words evoked a larger EPN than emotion-label and neutral words, supporting the mediated emotion concept account, density hypothesis, and embodiment emotion account. During the late elaborative processing stage, LTA participants exhibited larger LPC amplitudes than HTA individuals, which aligns with the "vigilance-avoidance" pattern.