Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2019 Feb;19(1):154-164. doi: 10.3758/s13415-018-00652-5.
Using event-related potentials, in this study we examined how implied emotion is derived from sentences. In the same sentential context, different emotionally neutral words rendered the whole sentence emotionally neutral and semantically congruent, emotionally negative and semantically congruent, or emotionally neutral and semantically incongruent. Relative to the words in the neutral-congruent condition, the words in the neutral-incongruent condition elicited a larger N400, indicating increased semantic processing, whereas the words in the negative-congruent condition elicited a long-lasting positivity between 300 and 1,000 ms, indicating an emotional response. The overlapping time windows of semantic processing and the emotional response suggest that the construction of emotional meaning operates concurrently with semantic unification. The results indicate that the implied emotional processing of sentences may be a result of unification operations but does not necessarily involve causal appraisal of a sentence's mental representation.
在这项研究中，我们使用事件相关电位来研究人们如何从句子中推断出隐含的情绪。在相同的句子语境中，不同的中性情绪词会使整个句子在情绪上保持中性且语义一致，在情绪上保持负面且语义一致，或者在情绪上保持中性且语义不一致。与中性一致条件下的词相比，中性不一致条件下的词会引起更大的 N400，表明语义处理增加，而负面一致条件下的词会在 300 到 1000 毫秒之间产生持续的正性波，表明存在情绪反应。语义处理和情绪反应的重叠时间窗口表明，情感意义的构建可能与语义统一同时进行。研究结果表明，句子的隐含情绪处理可能是统一操作的结果，但不一定涉及对句子心理表征的因果评价。
