Lai Vicky Tzuyin, Willems Roel M, Hagoort Peter
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
University of South Carolina.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2015 Aug;27(8):1528-41. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00798. Epub 2015 Mar 11.
This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, "The boy fell asleep and never woke up again," and their neutral counterparts "The boy stood up and grabbed his bag." This kind of negative sentence allows us to examine implied emotion derived at the sentence level, without associative emotion coming from word retrieval. We found that implied emotion in sentences, relative to neutral sentences, led to activation in some emotion-related areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the insula, as well as certain language-related areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus, which has been implicated in combinatorial processing. These results suggest that the emotional network involved in implied emotion is intricately related to the network for combinatorial processing in language, supporting the view that sentence meaning is more than simply concatenating the meanings of its lexical building blocks.
本研究调查了理解句子中隐含情感的脑区。参与者阅读不含否定词的否定句，例如，“男孩睡着了，再也没有醒来”，以及与之对应的中性句子“男孩站起来，拿起他的包”。这种否定句使我们能够考察在句子层面产生的隐含情感，而无需来自词汇检索的联想情感。我们发现，与中性句子相比，句子中的隐含情感会导致一些与情感相关的区域激活，包括内侧前额叶皮质、杏仁核和脑岛，以及某些与语言相关的区域，包括下额回，该区域与组合加工有关。这些结果表明，隐含情感所涉及的情感网络与语言组合加工网络密切相关，支持了句子意义不仅仅是简单地拼接其词汇组成部分意义的观点。
