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Emotion words affect eye fixations during reading

  • Graham G. Scott
    ,
  • Patrick J. O'Donnell
    ,
  • Sara C. Sereno
Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Abstract

Emotion words are generally characterized as possessing high arousal and extreme valence and have typically been investigated in paradigms in which they are presented and measured as single words. This study examined whether a word's emotional qualities influenced the time spent viewing that word in the context of normal reading. Eye movements were monitored as participants read sentences containing an emotionally positive (e.g., lucky), negative (e.g., angry), or neutral (e.g., plain) word. Target word frequency (high or low) was additionally varied to help determine the temporal locus of emotion effects, with interactive results suggesting an early lexical locus of emotion processing. In general, measures of target fixation time demonstrated significant effects of emotion and frequency as well as an interaction. The interaction arose from differential effects with negative words that were dependent on word frequency. Fixation times on emotion words (positive or negative) were consistently faster than those on neutral words with one exception—high-frequency negative words were read no faster than their neutral counterparts. These effects emerged in the earliest eye movement measures, namely, first and single fixation duration, suggesting that emotionality, as defined by arousal and valence, modulates lexical processing. Possible mechanisms involved in processing emotion words are discussed, including automatic vigilance and desensitization, both of which imply a key role for word frequency. Finally, it is important that early lexical effects of emotion processing can be established within the ecologically valid context of fluent reading. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 783-792

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition (Volume 38, Issue 3)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 24/07/2012

Publication status

Published - 24/07/2012

ISSN

0278-7393

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/235393
  • Scopus: 84865693697

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