This study examines the automaticity of processing the emotional aspects of words, and characterizes the oscillatory brain dynamics that accompany this automatic processing. Participants read emotionally negative, neutral and positive nouns while performing a color detection task in which only perceptual-level analysis was required. Event-related potentials and time frequency representations we...

Recognition memory studies often find that emotional items are more likely than neutral items to be labelled as studied. Previous work suggests this bias is driven by increased memory strength/familiarity for emotional items. We explored strength and bias interpretations of this effect with the conjecture that emotional stimuli might seem more familiar because they share features with studied i...

Embodied cognition is a theory that emphasizes the importance of sensorimotor experiences for cognition. Therefore, the present study focused on how the facial expression manipulation influences the property judgments toward Chinese emotional words. 41 college students were divided into “biting the pen with smile” group and control group to rate the same 26 Chinese emotional words chosen from a...