The role of valence and arousal for phonological iconicity in the lexicon of German: a cross-validation study using pseudoword ratings.

The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research - including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) - suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary:After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions.Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words - contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects.

Light-Dependent Effects of Prefrontal rTMS on Emotional Working Memory.

Growing evidence suggests that colored light exposure can affect several brain functions in addition to conscious visual perception. Blue as compared to green light has especially been shown to enhance alertness and vigilance, as well as cognitive functions. However, the role of light exposure in studies using non-invasive brain stimulation remains unclear. Here, we examined the impact of light on cognitive-emotional effects of prefrontal repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). In a randomized within-subjects design, twenty participants (12 males, 26 ± 4 years) were exposed to blue or green light prior and concomitant to active or sham rTMS (1Hz, 15min, 110% of the resting motor threshold), applied over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). In each condition, an emotional working memory task (EMOBACK) was presented pre- and post-intervention. Stimuli of the EMOBACK task were positive, negative and neutral words. Our results revealed valence-specific stimulation effects in dependence of colored light exposure. More specifically, task accuracy was significantly increased for positive stimuli under blue light and for negative stimuli under green light exposure. Our findings highlight the importance of state-dependency in studies using non-invasive brain stimulation and show blue light exposure to be a potential adjunctive technique to rTMS for enhancing cognitive-emotional modulation.

Attentional modulation of orthographic neighborhood effects during reading: Evidence from event-related brain potentials in a psychological refractory period paradigm.

It is often assumed that word reading proceeds automatically. Here, we tested this assumption by recording event-related potentials during a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, requiring lexical decisions about written words. Specifically, we selected words differing in their orthographic neighborhood size-the number of words that can be obtained from a target by exchanging a single letter-and investigated how influences of this variable depend on the availability of central attention. As expected, when attentional resources for lexical decisions were unconstrained, words with many orthographic neighbors elicited larger N400 amplitudes than those with few neighbors. However, under conditions of high temporal overlap with a high priority primary task, the N400 effect was not statistically different from zero. This finding indicates strong attentional influences on processes sensitive to orthographic neighbors during word reading, providing novel evidence against the full automaticity of processes involved in word reading. Furthermore, in conjunction with the observation of an underadditive interaction between stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and orthographic neighborhood size in lexical decision performance, commonly taken to indicate automaticity, our results raise issues concerning the standard logic of cognitive slack in the PRP paradigm.

Making sense of social interaction: Emotional coherence drives semantic integration as assessed by event-related potentials.

We compared event-related potentials during sentence reading, using impression formation equations of a model of affective coherence, to investigate the role of affective content processing during meaning making. The model of Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise, 1979, 2007) predicts and quantifies the degree to which social interactions deflect from prevailing social norms and values - based on the affective meanings of involved concepts. We tested whether this model can predict the amplitude of brain waves traditionally associated with semantic processing. To this end, we visually presented sentences describing basic subject-verb-object social interactions and measured event-related potentials for final words of sentences from three different conditions of affective deflection (low, medium, high) as computed by a variant of the ACT model (Schröder, 2011). Sentence stimuli were closely controlled across conditions for alternate semantic dimensions such as contextual constraints, cloze probabilities, co-occurrences of subject-object and verb-object relations. Personality characteristics (schizotypy, Big Five) were assessed to account for individual differences, assumed to influence emotion-language interactions in information processing. Affective deflection provoked increased negativity of ERP waves during the P2/N2 and N400 components. Our data suggest that affective incoherence is perceived as conflicting information interfering with early semantic processing and that increased respective processing demands - in particular in the case of medium violations of social norms - linger on until the N400 time window classically associated with the integration of concepts into embedding context. We conclude from these results that affective meanings influence basic stages of meaning making.

Effects of affective phonological iconicity in online language processing: Evidence from a letter search task.

The arbitrary relation between sound and meaning is a fundamental assumption of modern linguistic theory. However, psycholinguistic literature also reports evidence for iconicity of phonological symbols. Here, we focus on phonological iconicity or sound-meaning mappings with regard to affective word content. Analyses of affective ratings for a large-scale database of German words suggest potential sublexical affective values for certain graphemes, as they occur more frequently in words of certain affective meaning. Using a letter-search task, we investigate how these systematic mappings between phonology and affective word content influence online language processing. Responses were generally shorter for high-arousal target graphemes-involving crucial interactions with affective word content. Iconic form-meaning mappings regarding affective content seem to influence both the organization of the vocabulary and the processing of language using phonological units of high perceptual salience to iconically encode threat or alert. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Simple Co-Occurrence Statistics Reproducibly Predict Association Ratings.

What determines human ratings of association? We planned this paper as a test for association strength (AS) that is derived from the log likelihood that two words co-occur significantly more often together in sentences than is expected from their single word frequencies. We also investigated the moderately correlated interactions of word frequency, emotional valence, arousal, and imageability of both words (r's ≤ .3). In three studies, linear mixed effects models revealed that AS and valence reproducibly account for variance in the human ratings. To understand further correlated predictors, we conducted a hierarchical cluster analysis and examined the predictors of four clusters in competitive analyses: Only AS and word2vec skip-gram cosine distances reproducibly accounted for variance in all three studies. The other predictors of the first cluster (number of common associates, (positive) point-wise mutual information, and word2vec CBOW cosine) did not reproducibly explain further variance. The same was true for the second cluster (word frequency and arousal); the third cluster (emotional valence and imageability); and the fourth cluster (consisting of joint frequency only). Finally, we discuss emotional valence as an important dimension of semantic space. Our results suggest that a simple definition of syntagmatic word contiguity (AS) and a paradigmatic measure of semantic similarity (skip-gram cosine) provide the most general performance-independent explanation of association ratings.

Accuracy Validation of Neuronavigation Comparing Headholder-Based System with Head-Mounted Array-A Cadaveric Study.

BACKGROUND: Neuronavigation is widely used for intracranial neurosurgical procedures and is commonly based on the standard reference array being fixed to the headholder. Some cases require the reference array to be attached directly to the head. The aim of this cadaveric study was to compare operational accuracy of a head-mounted reference array with the standard headholder-based system. METHODS: Navigation accuracy was evaluated with 10 cadaveric specimens. Each specimen was prepared with 8 titanium microscrews that served as reference points on the external skull, and computed tomography was performed. Registration of all specimens was done using surface matching with infrared laser on three-dimensional reconstructed high-resolution computed tomography. In all 10 specimens, the head-mounted reference array and headholder-based system were compared by 10 repetitive measurements. The deviation was evaluated for each screw and compared using nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test between groups and screws. A Bland-Altman plot was generated for comparison. RESULTS: A total of 1600 measurements were conducted. Mean deviation was 1.97 mm (95% confidence interval, 1.90-2.03 mm) with the head-mounted reference array and 2.10 mm (95% confidence interval, 2.04-2.18 mm) with the headholder based system. There was no significant difference between methods in 9 of 10 specimens. In 1 specimen, the head-mounted array was superior. The deviation in either method showed a significant correlation, indicating high pertinence for registration (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Navigation with the head-mounted reference array demonstrated comparable accuracy to the headholder-based system and can be used without reduced accuracy. Careful registration is mandatory.

Why 'piss' is ruder than 'pee'? The role of sound in affective meaning making.

Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. lagoon). While this prominent feature of human language has always been creatively deployed in art and poetry, it is still largely unknown whether the sound of a word in itself makes any contribution to the word's meaning as perceived and interpreted by the listener. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words' meaning (i.e. affective meaning) and words' sound (i.e. affective sound); both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). We tested the hypothesis that the sound of a word possesses affective iconic characteristics that can implicitly influence listeners when evaluating the affective meaning of that word. The results show that a significant portion of the variance in affective meaning ratings of printed words depends on a number of spectral and temporal acoustic features extracted from these words after converting them to their spoken form (study1). In order to test the affective nature of this effect, we independently assessed the affective sound of these words using two different methods: through direct rating (study2a), and through acoustic models that we implemented based on pseudoword materials (study2b). In line with our hypothesis, the estimated contribution of words' sound to ratings of words' affective meaning was indeed associated with the affective sound of these words; with a stronger effect for arousal than for valence. Further analyses revealed crucial phonetic features potentially causing the effect of sound on meaning: For instance, words with short vowels, voiceless consonants, and hissing sibilants (as in 'piss') feel more arousing and negative. Our findings suggest that the process of meaning making is not solely determined by arbitrary mappings between formal aspects of words and concepts they refer to. Rather, even in silent reading, words' acoustic profiles provide affective perceptual cues that language users may implicitly use to construct words' overall meaning.

Embodiment and Emotional Memory in First vs. Second Language.

Language and emotions are closely linked. However, previous research suggests that this link is stronger in a native language (L1) than in a second language (L2) that had been learned later in life. The present study investigates whether such reduced emotionality in L2 is reflected in changes in emotional memory and embodied responses to L2 in comparison to L1. Late Spanish/English bilinguals performed a memory task involving an encoding and a surprise retrieval phase. Facial motor resonance and skin conductance (SC) responses were recorded during encoding. The results give first indications that the enhanced memory for emotional vs. neutral content (EEM effect) is stronger in L1 and less present in L2. Furthermore, the results give partial support for decreased facial motor resonance and SC responses to emotional words in L2 as compared to L1. These findings suggest that embodied knowledge involved in emotional memory is associated to increased affective encoding and retrieval of L1 compared to L2.

Phonological Iconicity Electrifies: An ERP Study on Affective Sound-to-Meaning Correspondences in German.

While linguistic theory posits an arbitrary relation between signifiers and the signified (de Saussure, 1916), our analysis of a large-scale German database containing affective ratings of words revealed that certain phoneme clusters occur more often in words denoting concepts with negative and arousing meaning. Here, we investigate how such phoneme clusters that potentially serve as sublexical markers of affect can influence language processing. We registered the EEG signal during a lexical decision task with a novel manipulation of the words' putative sublexical affective potential: the means of valence and arousal values for single phoneme clusters, each computed as a function of respective values of words from the database these phoneme clusters occur in. Our experimental manipulations also investigate potential contributions of formal salience to the sublexical affective potential: Typically, negative high-arousing phonological segments-based on our calculations-tend to be less frequent and more structurally complex than neutral ones. We thus constructed two experimental sets, one involving this natural confound, while controlling for it in the other. A negative high-arousing sublexical affective potential in the strictly controlled stimulus set yielded an early posterior negativity (EPN), in similar ways as an independent manipulation of lexical affective content did. When other potentially salient formal features at the sublexical level were not controlled for, the effect of the sublexical affective potential was strengthened and prolonged (250-650 ms), presumably because formal salience helps making specific phoneme clusters efficient sublexical markers of negative high-arousing affective meaning. These neurophysiological data support the assumption that the organization of a language's vocabulary involves systematic sound-to-meaning correspondences at the phonemic level that influence the way we process language.

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts-A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger.

The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales-valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking-for 57 German poems ("die verteidigung der wölfe") which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either "friendly," "sad," or "spiteful." Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43-70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23-48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level.

When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and Affective Norms of 619 Idioms for German (PANIG).

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom and rated how confident they were about the attributed meaning. The results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results from single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meanings of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meanings of ambiguous idioms were less correctly defined than those of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterizing idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing.

Activation Patterns throughout the Word Processing Network of L1-dominant Bilinguals Reflect Language Similarity and Language Decisions.

A crucial aspect of bilingual communication is the ability to identify the language of an input. Yet, the neural and cognitive basis of this ability is largely unknown. Moreover, it cannot be easily incorporated into neuronal models of bilingualism, which posit that bilinguals rely on the same neural substrates for both languages and concurrently activate them even in monolingual settings. Here we hypothesized that bilinguals can employ language-specific sublexical (bigram frequency) and lexical (orthographic neighborhood size) statistics for language recognition. Moreover, we investigated the neural networks representing language-specific statistics and hypothesized that language identity is encoded in distributed activation patterns within these networks. To this end, German-English bilinguals made speeded language decisions on visually presented pseudowords during fMRI. Language attribution followed lexical neighborhood sizes both in first (L1) and second (L2) language. RTs revealed an overall tuning to L1 bigram statistics. Neuroimaging results demonstrated tuning to L1 statistics at sublexical (occipital lobe) and phonological (temporoparietal lobe) levels, whereas neural activation in the angular gyri reflected sensitivity to lexical similarity to both languages. Analysis of distributed activation patterns reflected language attribution as early as in the ventral stream of visual processing. We conclude that in language-ambiguous contexts visual word processing is dominated by L1 statistical structure at sublexical orthographic and phonological levels, whereas lexical search is determined by the structure of both languages. Moreover, our results demonstrate that language identity modulates distributed activation patterns throughout the reading network, providing a key to language identity representations within this shared network.

10 years of BAWLing into affective and aesthetic processes in reading: what are the echoes?

Reading is not only "cold" information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such "hot" reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies.

The magical activation of left amygdala when reading Harry Potter: an fMRI study on how descriptions of supra-natural events entertain and enchant.

Literature containing supra-natural, or magical events has enchanted generations of readers. When reading narratives describing such events, readers mentally simulate a text world different from the real one. The corresponding violation of world-knowledge during this simulation likely increases cognitive processing demands for ongoing discourse integration, catches readers' attention, and might thus contribute to the pleasure and deep emotional experience associated with ludic immersive reading. In the present study, we presented participants in an MR scanner with passages selected from the Harry Potter book series, half of which described magical events, while the other half served as control condition. Passages in both conditions were closely matched for relevant psycholinguistic variables including, e.g., emotional valence and arousal, passage-wise mean word imageability and frequency, and syntactic complexity. Post-hoc ratings showed that readers considered supra-natural contents more surprising and more strongly associated with reading pleasure than control passages. In the fMRI data, we found stronger neural activation for the supra-natural than the control condition in bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral inferior parietal lobules, left fusiform gyrus, and left amygdala. The increased activation in the amygdala (part of the salience and emotion processing network) appears to be associated with feelings of surprise and the reading pleasure, which supra-natural events, full of novelty and unexpectedness, brought about. The involvement of bilateral inferior frontal gyri likely reflects higher cognitive processing demand due to world knowledge violations, whereas increased attention to supra-natural events is reflected in inferior frontal gyri and inferior parietal lobules that are part of the fronto-parietal attention network.

The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter--an fMRI study.

Previous studies suggested that the emotional connotation of single words automatically recruits attention. We investigated the potential of words to induce emotional engagement when reading texts. In an fMRI experiment, we presented 120 text passages from the Harry Potter book series. Results showed significant correlations between affective word (lexical) ratings and passage ratings. Furthermore, affective lexical ratings correlated with activity in regions associated with emotion, situation model building, multi-modal semantic integration, and Theory of Mind. We distinguished differential influences of affective lexical, inter-lexical, and supra-lexical variables: differential effects of lexical valence were significant in the left amygdala, while effects of arousal-span (the dynamic range of arousal across a passage) were significant in the left amygdala and insula. However, we found no differential effect of passage ratings in emotion-associated regions. Our results support the hypothesis that the emotion potential of short texts can be predicted by lexical and inter-lexical affective variables.

Emotional connotations of words related to authority and community.

We present a database of 858 German words from the semantic fields of authority and community, which represent core dimensions of human sociality. The words were selected on the basis of co-occurrence profiles of representative keywords for these semantic fields. All words were rated along five dimensions, each measured by a bipolar semantic-differential scale: Besides the classic dimensions of affective meaning (valence, arousal, and potency), we collected ratings of authority and community with newly developed scales. The results from cluster, correlational, and multiple regression analyses on the rating data suggest a robust negativity bias for authority valuation among German raters recruited via university mailing lists, whereas community ratings appear to be rather unrelated to the well-established affective dimensions. Furthermore, our data involve a strong overall negative correlation-rather than the classical U-shaped distribution-between valence and arousal for socially relevant concepts. Our database provides a valuable resource for research questions at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and social psychology. It can be downloaded as supplemental materials with this article.

Can Harry Potter still put a spell on us in a second language? An fMRI study on reading emotion-laden literature in late bilinguals.

In this fMRI study we contrasted emotional responses to literary reading in late bilinguals' first or second language. German participants with adequate English proficiency in their second language (L2) English read short text passages from Harry Potter books characterized by a "negative" or "positive" versus "neutral" emotional valence manipulation. Previous studies have suggested that given sufficient L2 proficiency, neural substrates involved in L1 versus L2 do not differ (Fabbro, 2001). On the other hand, the question of attenuated emotionality of L2 language processing is still an open debate (see Conrad, Recio, & Jacobs, 2011). Our results revealed a set of neural structures involved in the processing of emotion-laden literature, including emotion-related amygdala and a set of lateral prefrontal, anterior temporal, and temporo-parietal regions associated with discourse comprehension, high-level semantic integration, and Theory-of-Mind processing. Yet, consistent with post-scan emotion ratings of text passages, factorial fMRI analyses revealed stronger hemodynamic responses to "happy" than to "neutral" in bilateral amygdala and the left precentral cortex that were restricted to L1 reading. Furthermore, multivariate pattern analyses (MVPA) demonstrated better classifiability of differential patterns of brain activity elicited by passages of different emotional content in L1 than in L2 for the whole brain level. Overall, our results suggest that reading emotion-laden texts in our native language provides a stronger and more differentiated emotional experience than reading in a second language.

Fiction feelings in Harry Potter: haemodynamic response in the mid-cingulate cortex correlates with immersive reading experience.

Immersion in reading, described as a feeling of 'getting lost in a book', is a ubiquitous phenomenon widely appreciated by readers. However, it has been largely ignored in cognitive neuroscience. According to the fiction feeling hypothesis, narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be empathic with the protagonists and thus engage the affective empathy network of the brain, the anterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex, than do stories with neutral contents. To test the hypothesis, we presented participants with text passages from the Harry Potter series in a functional MRI experiment and collected post-hoc immersion ratings, comparing the neural correlates of passage mean immersion ratings when reading fear-inducing versus neutral contents. Results for the conjunction contrast of baseline brain activity of reading irrespective of emotional content against baseline were in line with previous studies on text comprehension. In line with the fiction feeling hypothesis, immersion ratings were significantly higher for fear-inducing than for neutral passages, and activity in the mid-cingulate cortex correlated more strongly with immersion ratings of fear-inducing than of neutral passages. Descriptions of protagonists' pain or personal distress featured in the fear-inducing passages apparently caused increasing involvement of the core structure of pain and affective empathy the more readers immersed in the text. The predominant locus of effects in the mid-cingulate cortex seems to reflect that the immersive experience was particularly facilitated by the motor component of affective empathy for our stimuli from the Harry Potter series featuring particularly vivid descriptions of the behavioural aspects of emotion.