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Emotion

Does the chance to win money change how we process emotional words?

Kaltwasser L, Ries S, Sommer W, et al. · Frontiers in psychology · 2013

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

Expecting to win money and reading an emotional word each changed brain responses, but at different times and in different places, and the two effects did not combine.

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Study at a glance

Design
Human experiment — Within-subject design crossing word valence (positive, negative, neutral), reward cue (+5 cents gain, -5 cents loss, or nothing at stake) and word concreteness (concrete vs abstract); participants judged each word as concrete or abstract while 64-channel EEG was recorded
N
N=18 · 24 students were tested; 4 were excluded for EEG artifacts, 1 for too few trials and 1 for not following instructions, leaving 18 in the analyses
Population
Right-handed native-English-speaking UC Berkeley students
Outcome
Reaction time and accuracy of concreteness decisions, and event-related potentials (P2, early posterior negativity, N400, late positive complex) to the reward cues and the words

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Key findings

Reward cues sped up and slightly improved responses when gain was possible, and the gain cue produced a larger early P2 component to both the cue and the following word. Emotional words, both positive and negative, produced a larger late positive complex about 400-700 ms after the word than neutral words did. Crucially, reward expectancy and word emotion never interacted in behaviour or in any brain measure, suggesting two independent, successive processes. Unexpectedly, emotion helped with abstract words but slowed decisions for concrete words.

Methodology

Students read 300 English nouns that were positive, negative or neutral, and had to decide as fast as possible whether each was concrete or abstract. Before each word, a cue told them whether a correct answer would win 5 cents, an error would lose 5 cents, or nothing was at stake. EEG was recorded throughout so the researchers could track event-related brain potentials to the cue and to the word, and test whether reward expectancy boosted the brain's response to emotional words.

Limitations

The final sample was only 18 students, so the key finding is a null interaction; the authors argue it is not a power problem because the main effects were significant, but small interactions could still be missed. The ERP analysis scanned many 100 ms windows across 64 electrodes without predefined components, which the authors themselves describe as exploratory. Emotional words differed from neutral words in arousal as well as valence, so the design cannot say which of the two drove the effects, and the stakes (5 cents) were small. The concreteness task may have suppressed early emotion effects such as the early posterior negativity, which was not found.

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