The influence of emotional context on emotional word processing in discourse comprehension: evidence from event-related potential

This research utilized event-related potential (ERP) recording technology to examine the effect of emotional context on the processing of emotional information in sentences. Three types of emotion-consistent discourse materials (neutral-neutral, positive-positive and negative-negative) were constructed to specifically express neutral, positive and negative emotions, respectively. Each discourse comprised two sentences, with the emotionally significant words embedded at the penultimate position of the second sentence. Participants were asked to read these texts, respond to reading comprehension questions and the ERP amplitude induced by the emotional words was recorded. The results indicated a tripartite interaction in the N400 and Late positive component amplitudes involving emotional context, emotional words and brain hemispheres, observed in both frontal and central brain regions. Notably, there was a significant difference in response to positive words between positive and negative contexts. The findings suggest that emotional context has a substantial effect on the processing of emotional words. Positive words, in comparison to negative ones, are more influenced by emotional context, particularly in the frontal and central regions of the brain.