Exploring The Effect Of Mood And Trait Anxiety On Emotion And Emotion-Laden Word Processing

Emotion word processing has been under investigation by researchers in the fields of linguistics,psychology as well as neuroscience in these years.In general,studies related to the processing of emotion words have been concentrated on the comparisons between the processing of emotion words with neutral words as well as the processing of emotion words in different contexts.Nevertheless,few research has examined the influence of state of mood and trait anxiety on emotion and emotion-laden word processing.In view of this,the current study tries to recruit native Chinese speakers to perform the lexical decision task to gain insights into the cognitive processing of emotion words and emotion-laden words under the modulation of mood and anxiety.A total of 120 Chinese-native university students participated in the experiments.A 2(Mood:Positive,Negative)x 2(Word Type:Emotion word,Emotion-laden word)x(Valence:Positive,Negative)mixed design were adopted in Experiment 1;and 2(Anxiety:Anxious,Non-anxiety)x 2(Word Type:Emotion word,Emotion-laden word)x(Valence:Positive,Negative)mixed design were adopted in Experiment 2.The tasks were administered to examine the cognitive processing of emotion words and emotion-laden words under the modulation of mood and anxiety.The participants'task was to discriminate the valence of the words,positive or negative,via a key press.Results showed that the 1)mean RTs for the positive-emotion words and positive-laden words was shorter than that for the negative-emotion words and negative-laden words.Besides,2)word type and valence interacted significantly in two experiments,and both confirmed that 3)RTs for negative words were longer relative to those for positive words when emotion words were processed,and 4)RTs for emotion-laden words were longer relative to those for emotion words when positive words were processed.This study examined the cognitive processing of emotion words and emotion-laden word,the difference of word processing mechanism with respect to word type and valence,and the effect of participant's state of mood and trait anxiety on emotion word and emotion-laden word processing.It not only extends the results of previous relevant studies but also contributes to the understandings of mental lexicon theory,the DRC model and the interactive activation model.Pedagogically,this study found response error for the word processing under positive mood was significantly higher than that of negative mood,which encourages learners to keep in a peaceful mood while learning emotion and emotion-laden words.In addition,it calls for the attention on the analysis at the sentence or paragraph level to further the discussion of the processing of words stimuli in terms of the modulation of mood and anxiety.In future studies,more neuroscience methods and techniques,such as ERP and fMRI,could be adopted.