Reading is an important part of our daily life, and rapid responses to emotional words have received a great deal of research interest. Our study employed rapid serial visual presentation to detect the time course of emotional noun processing using event-related potentials. We performed a dual-task experiment, where subjects were required to judge whether a given number was odd or even, and the...

Previous research has examined the effects of emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotion information) in semantic categorization (SCT), word naming, and Stroop tasks (Newcombe et al., 2012; Siakaluk et al., 2014; Moffat et al., 2015). However, to date there are no published reports on whether emotional experience influences performance in the lexical decision task (LDT)...

The present study explored the effect of speaker prosody on the representation of words in memory. To this end, participants were presented with a series of words and asked to remember the words for a subsequent recognition test. During study, words were presented auditorily with an emotional or neutral prosody, whereas during test, words were presented visually. Recognition performance was com...

A dual task of attachment priming and memory recognition was proposed to explore the effect of adult attachment styles on the incidental memory for emotional words. Subjects completed an attachment priming task which intends to activate internal working model of attachment by describing attachment-related scenes, and then an incidental memory recognition test of words which differ in emotional ...

An eye-movement-contingent display change technique was employed to study whether adult readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words during reading. Three types of parafoveal preview conditions were contrasted: an emotional word, a neutral word, and an identical word condition. To have a maximally effective parafoveal manipulation, high-arousal emotional words (sex- and threat-rel...

An emotional memory advantage has been found across the life span where recall is better for emotional (as opposed to neutral) stimuli. Our goal was to design emotionally valent word lists for easy use by practitioners and to test whether demented and healthy elderly participants showed an emotional memory advantage with these lists. Three new word lists (a positive, a negative, and a neutral l...

High-density brain electrical activity elicited by physical threat, positive and neutral words were recorded in 33 healthy individuals screened for high or low anxiety sensitivity (AS) during a modified emotional Stroop task. The paradigm allowed the separate assessment of block and mixed-trial effects. In the block analysis, a significant emotional RT slowing was observed along with the modula...

Recent neuroimaging results suggest that distinct regions within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) may differentially support the episodic encoding of item and relational information for nonemotional stimuli . The present study was designed to assess whether these findings generalize to emotional stimuli. Behaviorally, we found that emotion reduced item recognition accuracy but did not reliably af...

The role of Stroop processes in the emotional Stroop effect was subjected to a conceptual scrutiny augmented by a series of experiments entailing reading or lexical decision as well as color naming. The analysis showed that the Stroop effect is not defined in the emotional Stroop task. The experiments showed that reading, lexical decision, and color naming all are slower with emotional words an...