Effects of emotional experience in abstract and concrete word processing

Theories of grounded cognition (Basalou, 2005 Vigliocco, Meteyard, Andrews, & Kousta, 2009) suggest that emotion is a dimension of knowledge important for processing abstract concepts, and to a lesser degree, concrete concepts. Emotional experience (EE) is a variable that has been shown to facilitate the processing of abstract words and inhibit the processing of concrete words in semantic categorization (SCT Newcombe, Campbell, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2012). The present work extends these findings by examining the effects of EE on abstract and concrete words in lexical decision (LDT), SCT, and semantic lexical decision (SLDT). In LDT, EE exerted facilitatory effects on response latencies for both types of words. In SCT and SLDT, EE exerted facilitatory effects on response latencies and errors for abstract words, but exerted inhibitory effects for concrete words. The results suggest that effects of EE (i.e., emotion knowledge) are dependent on both the nature of the stimuli and task demands. --Leaf ii.