Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of context on emotional word processing in healthy younger and older adults

一个词的情感表征取决于不同的句子语境。例如，当“holiday”作为一个单词出现时，感觉很愉快。但是，当它被嵌入到一个句子的语境中，例如，“假期是有压力的”，这个词的情感内涵可以瞬间变成消极的东西。本项目通过两种方式研究语境对老年人词汇情感内涵的影响。首先，老年人通常会表现出一种积极的偏见。即倾向于关注积极信息。与年轻人相比，老年人在积极或消极语境中如何更新词汇的情感内涵？第二，在情感模糊的情况下，老年人会因为他们的积极偏见而预测积极的结局吗？这些发现揭示了句子处理和情绪调节之间的联系，以及如何利用这种与年龄相关的积极偏见来改善老年人的情绪健康，这是这个老龄化社会迫切需要解决的问题。该项目使用基于网络的调查和脑电图（EEG）来研究在老年人和年轻人的语言理解过程中，单词的情感表征是如何被检索、更新和预激活的。最重要的假设是，与年龄相关的积极偏见影响一个词的情感特征，不仅在阅读目标词之前的语境中，而且在阅读目标词之前的预测或预测特征。进行了两项研究。一项研究考察了与年龄相关的积极偏见是否以及如何影响句子理解过程中单词情绪特征的更新。目标词被嵌入到肯定句或否定句中，例如，“Holiday is stressed /wonderful”，然后再次出现，例如，“Holiday”。在目标单词第一次和第二次出现时进行脑波分析，以确定单词的情感表征的变化。预期的结果是，与年轻人相比，老年人在积极环境中比在消极环境中更有效地进行语境更新。另一项研究调查了年龄相关的积极偏见是否以及如何影响对情感模糊句子中情感特征的预测，例如，“玛丽收到了考试成绩”。参与者先读这样的句子，然后是一个情感上一致或不一致的目标词，例如“通过”或“失败”。预期的结果是，老年人会预先激活与积极目标一致的积极特征，但与消极目标不一致。这些结果将有助于研究情感语言理解和终身语言预测机制。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Emotional representations of a word depend on different sentential contexts. For instance, “holiday” feels pleasant when it appears as a single word. But when it is embedded in a sentential context, e.g., “holidays are stressful”, the emotional connotation of the word can be instantaneously changed into something negative. This project investigates the effect of context on the emotional connotations of words in older adults, in two ways. First, older adults typically show a positivity bias--i.e., the tendency to focus on positive information. How do older adults update the emotional connotations of words in positive or negative contexts, compared with younger adults? Second, in emotionally ambiguous scenarios, would older adults predict positive endings, as a result of their positivity bias? These findings shed light on the link between sentence processing and emotion regulation, and how such age-related positivity bias can be leveraged to improve older adults’ emotional well-being, which is a pressing issue in this aging society.This project uses web-based surveys and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate how the emotional representation of a word is retrieved, updated, and pre-activated during language comprehension in older and younger adults. The overarching hypothesis is that age-related positivity bias influences the affective features of a word, not only during the reading of the target word given its preceding context, but also the prediction or predicted features prior to reading the target word. Two studies are conducted. One study examines whether and how age-related positivity bias influences the updating of emotional features of a word during sentence comprehension. Target words are embedded in positive or negative sentences, e.g., "Holiday is stressful/wonderful", first and then are presented again, e.g., "holiday". Brainwave analyses are performed at the first and the second occurrences of the target word, to identify changes of emotional representations of the word. The expected outcome is that older adults will be more effective in contextual updating in a positive context than in a negative context, in comparison to younger adults. The other study investigates whether and how age-related positivity bias influences prediction of affective features in emotionally ambiguous sentences, e.g., "Mary received the exam results". Participants read such sentences first, and then an emotionally congruent or incongruent target word, e.g., "pass" or "fail". The expected outcome is that older adults will pre-activate positive features congruent with the positive target, but incongruent with the negative target. These results will contribute to emotional language comprehension and predictive mechanisms in language across the lifespan.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.