Signum: Estudos da Linguagem (Dec 2016)
HOW ARE EMOTIONAL PERCEPTS RECOGNIZED? CORRELATION BETWEEN PRIMING EFFECTS AND ERP COMPONENTS COULD INDICATE CONTRIBUTION OF SEMANTIC MEMORY AND VERBAL LANGUAGE
Abstract
A research body using cerebral electrophysiology has revealed that affective prosody yelds context effects on emotion recognition in priming paradigm (inconguence prosody-face produces higher peaks of N400, an ERP associated to semantic integration of sentences). At the same time, some data likewise show that judgements of emotional faces can be impaired if the lexical access to word denoting the judged emotion is prevented. In an experiment employing repetition priming, the momentary suspension of the meaning of emotional word has obstructed the recognition of face percepts as a token of the same face type. These data suggest, rather than a merely pre-conceptual process, the emotion perception is either conceptual and linguistic. This fact leads to a review of role of prosody in tasks of judgment of emotional percepts. The present discussion holds that the prosody can only work as prime (pre-activation stimulus) to face target, or to any other stimulus, because it itself is organized linguistically within a semantic memory for emotional events. This view is consistent thus with the linguistic relativism stream, according to which the language shapes the thought and the way one notices the world.
