Language
Does a bad mood change how we predict words while reading?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
After watching sad film clips, readers stopped using verb meaning to predict who a sentence would talk about next, while their grammar processing stayed largely intact.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject EEG/ERP study with positive (Happy Feet) versus negative (Sophie's Choice) film-clip mood induction in two sessions a week apart, measuring ERPs to pronouns that fit or violated verb-based implicit causality and to subject-verb agreement errors; plus a between-subjects story-completion experiment
- N
- N=32 · 55 women recorded for EEG, 32 analysed after exclusions (16 in the 'mood-responsive' subgroup); 40 different women in the behavioural story-completion study (20 per mood condition)
- Population
- Right-handed female native Dutch speakers, mostly university-aged, without neurological or reading impairment
- Outcome
- ERP positivity (400-700 ms) to bias-inconsistent pronouns, P600 to agreement violations, N1/P2; self-reported mood; proportion of bias-consistent story completions
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Key findings
After the cheerful clips, pronouns that clashed with the verb's implied cause produced a positive brain-wave deflection around 400-600 ms, showing readers had been predicting the other person. After the sad clips this effect disappeared, and the difference between moods was significant; among the 16 participants whose mood clearly changed, the pattern was especially clear. Mood did not change early visual brain responses or the size of the P600 response to grammar errors. In the story-completion study, both mood groups gave about 90% bias-consistent completions, so a bad mood did not weaken the verb bias itself.
Methodology
Women read short Dutch stories word by word while their brain activity was recorded with EEG, in two sessions a week apart: one after cheerful clips from Happy Feet and one after sad clips from Sophie's Choice. Some stories used verbs like 'praise' or 'apologize' that make one person the likely cause, followed by a pronoun that either fitted or clashed with that expectation. Other stories contained grammar errors such as 'The boys turns' as a control. In a follow-up, 40 new women saw the same clips and simply completed the stories after 'because' to see whether mood changed the verb bias itself.
Limitations
The film clips only worked as intended for about half the EEG participants, and the clearest results come from that self-selected subgroup of 16, which weakens the causal claim. Only women were tested, and the positive clips did not raise mood above baseline, so the study really compares a maintained mood with a worsened one. The two films also differ in complexity, realism and arousal, not just valence, so something other than mood could contribute. The finding concerns one type of prediction (implicit causality) in reading, and the authors do not show that all language anticipation is affected.
How this study connects
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