How ‘love’ and ‘hate’ differ from ‘sleep’: Using combined electro/magnetoencephalographic data to reveal the sources of early cortical responses to emotional words

Abstract

Emotional words--as symbols for biologically relevant concepts--are preferentially processed in brain regions including the visual cortex, frontal and parietal regions, and a corticolimbic circuit including the amygdala. Some of the brain structures found in functional magnetic resonance imaging are not readily apparent in electro- and magnetoencephalographic (EEG; MEG) measures. By means of a combined EEG/MEG source localization procedure to fully exploit the available information, we sought to reduce these discrepancies and gain a better understanding of spatiotemporal brain dynamics underlying emotional-word processing. Eighteen participants read high-arousing positive and negative, and low-arousing neutral nouns, while EEG and MEG were recorded simultaneously. Combined current-density reconstructions (L2-minimum norm least squares) for two early emotion-sensitive time intervals, the P1 (80-120 ms) and the early posterior negativity (EPN, 200-300 ms), were computed using realistic individual head models with a cortical constraint. The P1 time window uncovered an emotion effect peaking in the left middle temporal gyrus. In the EPN time window, processing of emotional words was associated with enhanced activity encompassing parietal and occipital areas, and posterior limbic structures. We suggest that lexical access, being underway within 100 ms, is speeded and/or favored for emotional words, possibly on the basis of an "emotional tagging" of the word form during acquisition. This gives rise to their differential processing in the EPN time window. The EPN, as an index of natural selective attention, appears to reflect an elaborate interplay of distributed structures, related to cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and evaluation of emotional stimuli.

Lions, tigers, and bears, oh sh!t: Semantics versus tabooness in speech production

“…Taboo distractors must therefore quickly grab attention, consistent with a faster rate of exceeding the competition threshold, which in turn slows picture naming. It is plausible that highly arousing emotional words more rapidly exceed a competition threshold than semantically related words, in part because the former are quickly recognized (Keuper et al, 2012) and/or because taboo words have lower thresholds for detection (Gaillard et al, 2006). It is worth noting an alternative explanation for why taboo, but not semantic, distractors interfered at later SOAs: The strength of taboo distractors may be greater than semantic distractors, allowing them to exert their influence throughout the entire time course of lemma access, whereas semantic distractors can only exert their influence earlier, when lemma access is at its peak.…”

“…Under competitive models, distractor characteristics (e.g., visibility; Piai et al, 2012) are proposed to influence the likelihood that distractors exceed the competition threshold. We propose that a distractor's emotional characteristics, specifically its tabooness, affect the rate at which distractors exceed the threshold: Tabooness allows distractors to more rapidly exceed the competition threshold due to their high arousal and speeded lexical access (Keuper et al, 2012), drawing attentional resources away from picture naming and slowing naming times. Evidence also suggests that disengaging from strong emotional words is difficult (Frings, Englert, Wentura, & Bermeitinger, 2010), which could result in slower blocking of taboo distractors.…”

Vivid: How valence and arousal influence word processing under different task demands

“…Event-related potentials (ERPs) enable just this, and there have now been a number ERP studies examining the neurocognitive processes recruited in response to emotional stimuli, including words. Some of these studies report very early effects of emotion, within the first 150ms of word-onset, with effects reported on the N1 component (Briesemeister, Kuchinke, & Jacobs, 2014; Hinojosa, Méndez-Bértolo, & Pozo, 2010; Hofmann, Kuchinke, Tamm, Võ, & Jacobs, 2009; Kissler & Herbert, 2013; Wang, Bastiaansen, Yang, & Hagoort, 2013), the P2 component (González-Villar, Triñanes, Zurrón, & Carrillo-de-la-Peña, 2014; Herbert, Kissler, Junghöfer, Peyk, & Rockstroh, 2006; Kanske & Kotz, 2007; Ortigue et al, 2004; Wang et al, 2013), or on other early perceptual components (Bayer, Sommer, & Schacht, 2012; Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, 2001; Keuper et al, 2014; Scott, O'Donnell, Leuthold, & Sereno, 2009; Zhang et al, 2014). This has been taken to reflect a very early influence of emotion on initial perceptual processing.…”

Perceived Communicative Context and Emotional Content Amplify Visual Word Processing in the Fusiform Gyrus

“…Source analyses revealed generators of early emotion effects in word processing in primary visual cortex (Ortigue et al, 2004) and in left extrastriate visual cortex , including the fusiform gyri (Hofmann et al, 2009) and left middle temporal gyrus (Keuper et al, 2014). For emotional pictures, LPP generators have been found in occipitoparietal (Schupp et al, 2007;Moratti et al, 2011) and frontal regions (Moratti et al, 2011).…”