Modulating effects of words' emotional connotations on early stages of word processing

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Recent developments in word recognition research document that emotional connotations of a word affect its processing. In particular, electrophysiological findings show that such influences are visible in early stages of word processing, and it must be assumed that the effects of a word's emotional connotation take place in parallel to the word identification process. While the 'affective primacy' hypothesis (Murphy and Zajonc, 1993) generally assumes that emotional processing may precede cognitive processing, this project examines an alternative hypothesis for the case of word processing. Under the assumption that such effects of emotional words can be attributed to learned, emotionally toned lexico-semantic associations, that themselves facilitate word recognition, this project examines the role of these learned associations for the development of early emotional effects in word recognition and the specific conditions that elicit these early effects across several experimental studies. The effects of such newly-learned affective associations and their interaction with further variables that facilitate word processing will be examined by means of elektrophysiological studies. The results of these experiments will help to inform recent models of word recognition on how to include affective processing, and thus will touch on key issues of emotion processing and visual word recognition.