Remember they were emotional - Effects of emotional qualifiers during sentence processing

Abstract

We investigated whether emotional information facilitates retrieval and whether it makes representations more salient during sentence processing. Participants were presented with sentences including entities (nouns) that were either bare, with no additional information or that were emotionally or neutrally qualified by means of adjectives. Reading times in different word regions, specifically at the region following the verb where retrieval processes are measurable, were analysed. Qualified representations needed longer time to be build up than bare representations. Also, it was found that the amount of information and the type of information affect sentences processing and more specifically retrieval. In particular, retrieval for emotionally specified representations was faster than that for bare representations.

Keywords

• sentence processing
• retrieval
• emotion
• information load