Attention and regulation during emotional word comprehension in older adults: Evidence from event-related potentials and brain oscillations.

Older adults often show a positivity bias effect during picture processing, focusing more on positive than negative information. It is unclear whether this positivity bias effect generalizes to language and whether arousal matters. The present study investigated how age affects emotional word comprehension with varied valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low). We recorded older and younger participants' brainwaves (EEG) while they read positive/negative and high/low-arousing words and pseudowords, and made word/non-word judgments. Older adults showed increased N400s and left frontal alpha decreases (300-450 ms) for low-arousing positive as compared to low-arousing negative words, suggesting an arousal-dependent positivity bias during lexical retrieval. Both age groups showed similar LPPs to negative words. Older adults further showed a larger mid-frontal theta increase (500-700 ms) than younger adults for low-arousing negative words, possibly indicating down-regulation of negative meanings of low-arousing words. Altogether, our data supported the strength and vulnerability integration model of aging.

How do extraverts process jokes? An event-related potential study on humor processing.

Extraverts and introverts show different preferences for humor regarding different humor types. However, few studies focused on the neurological underpinnings of the connection between extraversion and the stage-wise cognitive model of humor processing. To investigate the influence of extraversion on different sub-stages of humor processing, electroencephalography (EEG) data was collected when participants read and rated jokes and non-jokes. The event-related potential (ERP) data showed a smaller N400 (300-500 ms) but a larger late positive potential (500-900 ms) for jokes than non-jokes, which may reflect lexical association and integrative interpretation in joke processing. The more extraverted group had a larger P2 (200-300 ms) and a smaller N400 than the less extraverted group in response to all the stimuli, which may indicate their different allocation of attentional and cognitive resources to external stimulation. Additionally, the regression analyses showed that the late positivity effects of jokes were positively correlated with the extraversion level. The results could imply extraverts' controlled processes of cognitive resource allocation for jokes, and suggest the same groups' attentiveness and motivation for reward stimuli (i.e., jokes). Importantly, our ERP data could support extraverts' increased exploration for verbal humor from a better temporal aspect for the first time.

Personality Traits and Emotional Word Recognition: An ERP Study.

Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of positive, neutral, and negative words that were matched for arousal. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from healthy participants while they performed a lexical decision task. We found that personality traits influenced emotional word recognition at N400 (300-450 ms) and LPC (450-800 ms). At the earlier (N400) stage, the more extraverted and neurotic a participant was, the more reduced the N400s for the positive words relative to neutral words were. This suggests that the extroverts and high neurotics (i.e., high impulsivity) identified positive content in words during lexical feature retrieval, which facilitated such retrieval. At the later (LPC) stage, both the introverts and high neurotics (i.e., high anxiety) showed greater LPCs to negative than neutral words, indicating their sustained attention and elaborative processing of negative information. These results suggest that extraversion and neuroticism collectively influence different stages of emotional word recognition in a way that is consistent with Gray's biopsychological theory of personality.

Sex differences in humor processing: An event-related potential study.

Numerous behavioral studies and a handful of functional neuroimaging studies have reported sex differences in humor. However, no study to date has examined differences in the time-course of brain activity during multistage humor processing between the sexes. The purpose of this study was to compare real-time dynamics related to humor processing between women and men, with reference to a proposed three-stage model (involving incongruity detection, incongruity resolution, and elaboration stages). Forty undergraduate students (20 women) underwent event-related potential recording while subjectively rating 30 question-answer-type jokes and 30 question-answer-type statements in a random order. Sex differences were revealed by analyses of the mean amplitudes of difference waves during a specific time window between 1000 and 1300 ms poststimulus onset (P1000-1300). This indicates that women recruited more mental resources to integrate cognitive and emotional components at this late stage. In contrast, men recruited more automated processes during the transition from the cognitive operations of the incongruity resolution stage to the emotional response of the humor elaboration stage. Our results suggest that sex differences in humor processing lie in differences in the integration of cognitive and emotional components, which are closely linked and interact reciprocally, particularly in women.