Negative induced mood influences word production: An event-related potentials study with a covert picture naming task

- Negative mood during in a grapheme monitoring task elicited larger N290.
- LORETA analyses suggested a neural origin of the N290 in prefrontal cortices.
- Negative mood impaired phonological encoding.
- The impairment might be explained in terms of linguistic and attentional mechanisms.

The present event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated the effects of mood on phonological encoding processes involved in word generation. For this purpose, negative, positive and neutral affective states were induced in participants during three different recording sessions using short film clips. After the mood induction procedure, participants performed a covert picture naming task in which they searched letters. The negative compared to the neutral mood condition elicited more negative amplitudes in a component peaking around 290 ms. Furthermore, results from source localization analyses suggested that this activity was potentially generated in the left prefrontal cortex. In contrast, no differences were found in the comparison between positive and neutral moods. Overall, current data suggest that processes involved in the retrieval of phonological information during speech generation are impaired when participants are in a negative mood. The mechanisms underlying these effects were discussed in relation to linguistic and attentional processes, as well as in terms of the use of heuristics.