title: A familiar font drives early emotional effects in word recognition.
abstract: The emotional connotation of a word is known to shift the process of word recognition. Using the electroencephalographic event-related potentials (ERPs) approach it has been documented that early attentional processing of high-arousing negative words is shifted at a stage of processing where a presented word cannot have been fully identified. Contextual learning has been discussed to contribute to these effects. The present study shows that a manipulation of the familiarity with a word's shape interferes with these earliest emotional ERP effects. Presenting high-arousing negative and neutral words in a familiar or an unfamiliar font results in very early emotion differences only in case of familiar shapes, whereas later processing stages reveal similar emotional effects in both font conditions. Because these early emotion-related differences predict later behavioral differences, it is suggested that contextual learning of emotional valence comprises more visual features than previously expected to guide early visual-sensory processing.
authors.affiliation: Experimental Psychology & Methods, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany. Electronic address: Lars.Kuchinke@rub.de.
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Kuchinke
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
authors.forename: Beatrix
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Krause
authors.affiliation: Experimental Psychology & Methods, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Nathalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fritsch
authors.affiliation: General and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Benny B
authors.initials: BB
authors.lastname: Briesemeister
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011327:Printing / Q000295:instrumentation*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Event-related potentials; Familiarity; Font; Valence; Visual word recognition