Pratt NL, Kelly SD.
Social Neuroscience, 3, 1-9
The present study investigated whether emotional states influence the neural processing of language. Event-related potentials recorded the brain's response to positively and negatively valenced words (e.g., love vs. death) while participants were directly induced into positive and negative moods. ERP electrodes in frontal scalp regions of the brain distinguished positive and negative words around 400 ms poststimulus. The amplitude of this negative waveform showed a larger negativity for positive words compared to negative words in the frontal electrode region when participants were in a positive, but not negative, mood. These findings build on previous research by demonstrating that people process affective language differently when in positive and negative moods, and lend support to recent views that emotion and cognition interact during language comprehension.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Friday, July 18, 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
ARTICLE UPDATE - The power of the word may reside in the power of affect.
Panksepp J.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 42, 47-55
This commentary on Dan Shanahan's, A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain, basically agrees with an emotion-based view of the evolutionary and developmental basis of language acquisition. It provides a supplementary neuroscience perspective that is more deeply affective and epigenetic in the sense that all claims about neocortically-based language modules need to be tempered by the existing genetic evidence as well as the robust neuroscience evidence that the cortex resembles random-access-memory space, a tabula rasa upon which epigenetic and learning processes create functional networks. The transition from non-linguistic creatures to linguistic ones may have required the conjunction of social-affective brain mechanisms, morphological changes in the articulatory apparatus, an abundance of cross-modal cortical processing ability, and the initial urge to communicate in coordinate prosodic gestural and vocal ways, which may have been more poetic and musical than current propositional language. There may be no language instinct that is independent of these evolutionary pre-adaptations.
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 42, 47-55
This commentary on Dan Shanahan's, A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain, basically agrees with an emotion-based view of the evolutionary and developmental basis of language acquisition. It provides a supplementary neuroscience perspective that is more deeply affective and epigenetic in the sense that all claims about neocortically-based language modules need to be tempered by the existing genetic evidence as well as the robust neuroscience evidence that the cortex resembles random-access-memory space, a tabula rasa upon which epigenetic and learning processes create functional networks. The transition from non-linguistic creatures to linguistic ones may have required the conjunction of social-affective brain mechanisms, morphological changes in the articulatory apparatus, an abundance of cross-modal cortical processing ability, and the initial urge to communicate in coordinate prosodic gestural and vocal ways, which may have been more poetic and musical than current propositional language. There may be no language instinct that is independent of these evolutionary pre-adaptations.
Monday, July 16, 2007
ARTICLE UPDATE - Language as context for the perception of emotion.
Barrett LF, Lindquist KA, Gendron M.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, in press
In the blink of an eye, people can easily see emotion in another person's face. This fact leads many to assume that emotion perception is given and proceeds independently of conceptual processes such as language. In this paper we suggest otherwise and offer the hypothesis that language functions as a context in emotion perception. We review a variety of evidence consistent with the language-as-context view and then discuss how a linguistically relative approach to emotion perception allows for intriguing and generative questions about the extent to which language shapes the sensory processing involved in seeing emotion in another person's face.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, in press
In the blink of an eye, people can easily see emotion in another person's face. This fact leads many to assume that emotion perception is given and proceeds independently of conceptual processes such as language. In this paper we suggest otherwise and offer the hypothesis that language functions as a context in emotion perception. We review a variety of evidence consistent with the language-as-context view and then discuss how a linguistically relative approach to emotion perception allows for intriguing and generative questions about the extent to which language shapes the sensory processing involved in seeing emotion in another person's face.
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