Kuchinke Lars, Jacobs Arthur M, Grubich Claudia, Võ Melissa L-H, Conrad Markus, Herrmann Manfred
Department of Psychology, Free University of Berlin, Germany.
Neuroimage. 2005 Dec;28(4):1022-32. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.06.050. Epub 2005 Aug 8.
The present study aimed at identifying the neural responses associated with the incidental processing of the emotional valence of single words using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Twenty right-handed participants performed a visual lexical decision task, discriminating between nouns and orthographically and phonologically legal nonwords. Positive, neutral and negative word categories were matched for frequency, number and frequency of orthographic neighbors, number of letters and imageability. Response times and accuracy data differed significantly between positive and neutral, and positive and negative words respectively, thus, replicating the findings of a pilot study. Words showed distributed, mainly left hemisphere activations, indicating involvement of a neural network responsible for semantic word knowledge. The neuroimaging data further revealed areas in left orbitofrontal gyrus and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus with greater activation to emotional than to neutral words. These brain regions are known to be involved in processing semantic and emotional information. Furthermore, distinct activations associated with positive words were observed in bilateral middle temporal and superior frontal gyrus, known to support semantic retrieval, and a distributed network, namely anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus, lingual gyrus and hippocampus when comparing positive and negative words. The latter areas were previously associated with explicit and not incidental processing of the emotional meaning of words and emotional memory retrieval. Thus, the results are discussed in relation to models of processing semantic and episodic emotional information.
本研究旨在利用事件相关功能磁共振成像（fMRI）识别与单个单词情感效价的偶然加工相关的神经反应。20名右利手参与者执行了一项视觉词汇判断任务，区分名词与在正字法和语音上合法的非词。对积极、中性和消极词汇类别在词频、正字法邻词的数量和词频、字母数量以及可想象性方面进行了匹配。积极词与中性词、积极词与消极词之间的反应时间和准确性数据分别存在显著差异，从而重复了一项初步研究的结果。单词呈现出分布式激活，主要位于左半球，表明负责语义词汇知识的神经网络参与其中。神经成像数据进一步显示，左眶额回和双侧额下回中对情感词的激活大于对中性词的激活。已知这些脑区参与语义和情感信息的加工。此外，在比较积极词和消极词时，在双侧颞中回和额上回观察到与积极词相关的明显激活，已知这些脑区支持语义检索，还观察到一个分布式网络，即前扣带回和后扣带回、舌回和海马体的激活。后一组脑区先前与单词情感意义的显性而非偶然加工以及情感记忆检索有关。因此，将结合语义和情景情感信息加工模型对结果进行讨论。
