Are you talking to me? Effects of communicative context on the cerebral dynamics of emotion word processing.
Final Report Abstract
This project investigated the effects of mood and perceived sender identity (human versus artificial) on the cortical processing of emotional words. Electrophysiology first demonstrated that mood sensitized early visual processing in a hemisphere-specific manner. Second, specifically positive mood amplified the early posterior negativity to positive stimuli in a moodcongruent manner. Third, in tendency, the late positive potential was most pronounced for negative words, regardless of mood induction. Hemodynamic modulations in response to mood-induction were found in the insula. Regardless of mood, processing of emotional, particularly negative, words induced stronger responses in the visual cortex. Perceiving a written statement as emotional trait feedback from another human, rather than as randomly generated by a computer, in spite of physically identical stimulation, likewise dramatically amplified the word’s visual processing, particularly in the fusiform gyrus. This largely held even when the computer was portrayed as equipped with a socially intelligent software. Amplifications of fusiform activity were also found in response to emotional stimuli. This finding that has previously been accounted for within the motivated attention framework. Thus, the present findings indicate that contextual factors can tune motivated attention to communicatory signals. These findings for the first time demonstrate effects of psychological (rather than physical) context on the processing of language stimuli and lay the groundwork for further investigations of communicative context in social and affective neuroscience.
Publications
- (2011). Pleasant pictures facilitate lexical decisions – An EEG study. Biological Psychology, 86(3):254-64
Kissler J & Kössler S
- (2012). Amygdala responsiveness to emotional words is modulated by subclinical anxiety and depression. Behavioral Brain Research; 233(2):508- 16
Laeger I, Dobel C, Dannlowski U, Kugel H, Grotegerd D, Kissler J, Keuper K, Eden A, Zwitserlood P, Zwanzger P
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2012.05.036) - (2012). How 'love' and 'hate' differ from 'sleep': Using combined EEG/MEG data to reveal the sources of early cortical responses to emotional words. Human Brain Mapping
Keuper K, Zwanzger P, Nordt M, Eden M, Laeger I, Zwitserlood P, Kissler J, Junghöfer M, Dobel C
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.22220) - (2012). Inferring mental states by means of functional imaging methods that probe brain responses to emotional language. Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Brain Computer Interfaces, pp. 284-287, Graz, Verlag der Technischen Universität Graz
Herbert C & Kissler J
- (2013). Emotion, Etmnooi, or Emitoon? - Faster lexical access to emotional than to neutral words during reading. Biological Psychology, 92(3):464-79
Kissler J, Herbert C
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.09.004) - (2013). Love Letters and Hate Mail - Cerebral Processing of Emotional Language Content. In J. Armony & P. Vuilleumier (Eds.) Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience, pp. 304-328. Cambridge University Press
Kissler J
- “It’s all in your head – how anticipating evaluation affects the processing of emotional trait adjectives“, Front. Psychol., 5:1292, 11 November 2014
Schindler S., Wegrzyn M., Steppacher I., Kissler J
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01292) - “Perceived communicative context and emotional content amplify visual word processing in the fusiform gyrus”. Journal of Neuroscience 15 April 2015, 35 (15) 6010-6019
Schindler S., Wegrzyn M., Steppacher I., Kissler J
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3346-14.2015)
