Three experiments were conducted to determine if emotional content increases repetition priming magnitude. In the study phase of Experiment 1, participants rated high-arousing negative (taboo) words and neutral words for concreteness. In the test phase, they made lexical decision judgements for the studied words intermixed with novel words (half taboo, half neutral) and pseudowords. In Experime...

Recall of emotion words is superior to neutral words. Prior work reported in this journal (Anooshian & Hertel, 1994) found that this effect was absent in a second language. Words in a second language may thus lack the emotional associations of words acquired in childhood. To determine whether memory probes may be generally useful for assessing emotionality effects in a first vs. a second langua...

Previous studies on the effects of emotional context on memory for centrally presented neutral items have obtained inconsistent results. And in most of those studies subjects were asked to either make a connection between the item and the context at study or retrieve both the item and the context. When no response for the contexts is required, how emotional contexts influence memory for neutral...

Attentional biases regarding attentional capture by threat-related stimuli in anxious people were investigated by using a standard spatial cueing procedure suitable to measure inhibition of return (IOR). In two experiments, participants categorized the emotional valence of either emotional (positive and negative words) or non-emotional (neutral words in both experiments and sets of 'xxx' in Exp...

A growing body of work on emotion-cognition interactions has revealed both facilitative and disruptive effects of emotion on working memory in younger adults. These differing effects may vary by the goal relevancy of emotion within a task. Additionally, it is possible that these emotional effects would be larger for older adults, considering findings of preserved emotional processing with age. ...

Second language speakers commonly acknowledge that taboo terms can be uttered with greater ease in their second language (L2) than in their first language (L1). To investigate this phenomenon psychophysiologically, 32 Turkish–English bilinguals rated a variety of stimuli for pleasantness in Turkish (L1) and English (L2) while skin conductance was monitored via fingertip electrodes. Participants...

A color-naming task was followed by incidental free recall to investigate how emotional words affect attention and memory. We compared taboo, nonthreatening negative-affect, and neutral words across three experiments. As compared with neutral words, taboo words led to longer color-naming times and better memory in both within- and between-subjects designs. Color naming of negative-emotion nonta...

Interference effects on threat words in anxious subjects on the emotional Stroop task have generally been interpreted as evidence for mood-congruent attentional bias in anxiety states. However, several recent studies have yielded results that run contrary to this attentional bias explanation. The most important of these conflicting findings show that: (1) panic disorder patients displayed inter...

We introduce the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) in order to provide researchers with a German database containing both emotional valence and imageability ratings for more than 2,200 German words. The BAWL was cross-validated using a forced choice valence decision task in which two distinct valence categories (negative or positive) had to be assigned to a highly controlled selection of 360 wo...

The present study examined whether processing words with affective connotations in a listener's native language may be modulated by accented speech. To address this question, we used the Event Related Potential (ERP) technique and recorded the cerebral activity of Spanish native listeners, who performed a semantic categorization task, while listening to positive, negative and neutral words prod...