Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Apr;45(2):395-406.
doi: 10.1007/s10936-015-9357-3.

Emotion Word Processing: Effects of Word Type and Valence in Spanish-English Bilinguals

Stephanie A Kazanas  1 , Jeanette Altarriba  2
Affiliations

Emotion Word Processing: Effects of Word Type and Valence in Spanish-English Bilinguals

Stephanie A Kazanas et al. J Psycholinguist Res. 2016 Apr.

Abstract

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in Int J Billing 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in Am J Psychol, in press), and rapid serial visual processing (Knickerbocker and Altarriba in Vis Cogn 21(5):599-627, 2013). Each of these studies has found significant differences in emotion and emotion-laden word processing. The current study investigated this word type distinction using a bilingual sample, to assess emotion and emotion-laden word processing in a bilingual's two languages. Sixty Spanish-English bilinguals performed a masked LDT with positive and negative emotion and emotion-laden word pairs, in either Spanish or English. Overall, the four-way interaction of relatedness, word type, valence, and language was significant. Response times (RTs) to emotion words were significantly faster than RTs to emotion-laden words, but only in English. These results indicate that the emotion/emotion-laden word type distinction may be the most robust in a person's dominant language.

Keywords: Emotion; Language dominance; Priming effects; Valence; Word type.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Am J Psychol. 2015 Fall;128(3):323-36 - PubMed
    1. Psychol Rev. 2001 Jul;108(3):483-522 - PubMed
    1. Int J Psychol. 2012;47(6):405-28 - PubMed
    1. Mem Cognit. 2004 Jul;32(5):742-51 - PubMed
    1. Behav Res Methods. 2013 Dec;45(4):1246-58 - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources