title: 10 years of BAWLing into affective and aesthetic processes in reading: what are the echoes?
abstract: Reading is not only "cold" information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such "hot" reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Cluster of Excellence "Languages of Emotion", Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Arthur M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Jacobs
authors.affiliation: Scene Grammar Lab, Department of Cognitive Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt Frankfurt, Germany.
authors.forename: Melissa L-H
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Võ
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Benny B
authors.initials: BB
authors.lastname: Briesemeister
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence "Languages of Emotion", Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Department of Cognitive, Social and Organizational Psychology, Universidad de La Laguna San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Conrad
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Department of Psychology, General and Biological Psychology, University of Wuppertal Wuppertal, Germany.
authors.forename: Markus J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Hofmann
authors.affiliation: Cluster of Excellence "Languages of Emotion", Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Experimental Psychology and Methods, Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr Universität Bochum Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Lars
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Kuchinke
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Cluster of Excellence "Languages of Emotion", Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Jana
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lüdtke
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Universität Salzburg Salzburg, Austria.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Braun
keywords: Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL); aesthetics; emotion; lexical decision task; neurocognitive poetics; reading; valence decision task; word recognition models