AUTHOR=Liu Jia , Fan Lin , Jiang Jiaxing , Li Chi , Tian Lingyun , Zhang Xiaokun , Feng Wangshu TITLE=Evidence for dynamic attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words: A behavioral and electrophysiological study JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=13 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.966774 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.966774 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

There has been no consensus on the neural dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words, which remains one of the major concerns in affective neurolinguistics. The current study adopted dot-probe tasks to investigate the valence effect on attentional bias toward Chinese emotion-label and emotion-laden words. Behavioral data showed that emotional word type and valence interacted in attentional bias scores with an attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words rather than positive emotion-label words and that this bias was derived from the disengagement difficulty in positive emotion-laden words. In addition, an attentional bias toward negative emotion-label words relative to positive emotion-label words was observed. The event-related potential (ERP) data demonstrated an interaction between emotional word type, valence, and hemisphere. A significant hemisphere effect was observed during the processing of positive emotion-laden word pairs rather than positive emotion-label, negative emotion-label, and negative emotion-laden word pairs, with positive emotion-laden word pairs eliciting an enhanced P1 in the right hemisphere as compared to the left hemisphere. Our results found a dynamic attentional bias toward positive emotion-laden words; individuals allocated more attention to positive emotion-laden words in the early processing stage and had difficulty disengaging attention from them in the late processing stage.