Acquired affective associations induce emotion effects in word recognition: An ERP study

The present study examined how contextual learning and in particular emotionality conditioning impacts the neural processing of words, as possible key factors for the acquisition of words’ emotional connotation. 21 participants learned on five consecutive days associations between meaningless pseudowords and unpleasant or neutral pictures using an evaluative conditioning paradigm. Subsequently, event-related potentials were recorded while participants implicitly processed the learned emotional relevance in a lexical decision paradigm. Emotional and neutral words were presented together with the conditioned pseudowords and a set of new pseudowords. Conditioned and new pseudowords differed in the late positive complex. Emotionally and neutrally conditioned stimuli differed in an early time window (80–120 ms) and in the P300. These results replicate ERP effects known from emotion word recognition and indicate that contextual learning and in particular evaluative conditioning is suitable to establish emotional associations in words, and to explain early ERP effects in emotion word recognition.

► Contextual learning and emotionality conditioning impacts word processing.
► ERPs to emotional conditioned pseudowords mirroring ERPs to emotional words.
► Conditioned and new pseudowords differed in the late positive complex of the ERP.
► Emotionally and neutrally conditioned stimuli differed in the P1-N1 and P3 interval.
► Learned emotional relevance can be used to explain emotion word recognition findings.