Does the task make a difference? Comparison of active and passive processing of emotional words with functional neuroimaging

The purpose of this fMRI study was to find out whether active processing of the emotional valence of adjectives leads to an activation of different brain regions than passively reading does. Neuronal activation of emotional words has been investigated in different contexts. Words vary from adjectives [4] and nouns [1,2] with positive, negative and neutral valence, adjectives describing personality traits [3] to nouns dealing with social or physical threat [5]. Different tasks are used e.g. passively reading, evaluation of the valence and lexical decision task. The influence of the task on neuronal activation, especially on brain regions responsible for emotional processing is not known so far.