An Embodied Study On The Inhibition Of Negative Laughter

Objectives As an abstract linguistic phenomenon,the essence of representation of negation has always been the controversial subject between the propositional theory and the embodied theory.The embodied theory on negation holds that negation can be embodied through the consumption of the time and the extension of the space.Negation inhibition theory holds that negation and action inhibition share the same neural mechanism,and some researches has proven that negation processing can affect action inhibition.In this research,we try to explore whether action inhibition can affect the processing of Chinese negation,so as to prove the embodied inhibition of negation.Methods There were two subject experiments in this study.A total of 43 college students in Hebei Province were participated in this study.Facial smiling muscles were controlled through hold-pen by teeth(HPT)and hold-pen-lip(HPL);“priming-target item”as experimental paradigm,affirmative and negative word“?”and“??”as prime and the positive emotional words related to"laught"as target items,and the participants were asked to judge the target items as pleasure or unpleasure in emotional word evaluation decision-making(EDT)and as true word or false word in lexical decision-making(LDT).All materials were presented by E-prime 2.0 software accuracy rate and response time,the EEG components of N400,P600 and N200,N400 and P600 as dependent variables.Results The results of Experiment 1 show that:1)the accuracy of negative prime was higher than that of positive prime;2)ERP results showed that positive priming words induced more pronounced p-P600 than that of negative priming words at frontal-central electrodes;HPT induced more pronouced t-N400 than HPL at frontal-parietal electrodes.The results of Experiment 2 showed that:1)the response time of negative priming emotional words is greater than that of positive emotional words;2)HPT induced more pronouced p-P600 than that of HPL at frontal-central electrodes;there were significant interaction between polarity and biting mode on t-N200 at frontal-central and prefrontal electrodes,and HPT induced more deflected amplitude than HPL under negative priming;there was a proximity significant interaction between polarity and biting mode on t-P600 at prefrontal electrodes,HPT induced more deflected t-P600 amplitude than HPL under affirmative priming.Conclusions 1.Laughing muscle inhibition can promote the processing of negation of related emotional words;2.Negation processing can be comprehensioned under non-attention conditions,and the negation effect has begun before the negation content is presented;3.Compared with LDT task,EDT task is more suitable for laughing muscle inhibition research.Figure 7;Table 16;Reference 131.