Emotion Word Processing: Effects of Word Type and Valence in Spanish-English Bilinguals.
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.
Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, 12222, USA. skazanas@albany.edu.
Stephanie A
SA
Kazanas
Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, 12222, USA.
Jeanette
J
Altarriba
D000328:Adult; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
Emotion; Language dominance; Priming effects; Valence; Word type