title: Feel between the lines: implied emotion in sentence comprehension.
abstract: This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, "The boy fell asleep and never woke up again," and their neutral counterparts "The boy stood up and grabbed his bag." This kind of negative sentence allows us to examine implied emotion derived at the sentence level, without associative emotion coming from word retrieval. We found that implied emotion in sentences, relative to neutral sentences, led to activation in some emotion-related areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the insula, as well as certain language-related areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus, which has been implicated in combinatorial processing. These results suggest that the emotional network involved in implied emotion is intricately related to the network for combinatorial processing in language, supporting the view that sentence meaning is more than simply concatenating the meanings of its lexical building blocks.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.|University of South Carolina.
authors.forename: Vicky Tzuyin
authors.initials: VT
authors.lastname: Lai
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.|Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Roel M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Willems
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.|Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hagoort
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult