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Method Participants A total of 479 undergraduate students from Western Sydney University were recruited via convenience sampling and participated in a study investigating the effects of age of acquisition and the emotional nature of words in lexical access. Participation was completed voluntarily as part of an assessment task. Data from 104 participants was rejected as they either did not complete the task or their accuracy was less than 80%. Therefore, the final sample size was 375. Materials and Apparatus Two sets of letter strings were used in the experiment: words and nonwords. All the stimuli were 3 to 8 characters long. There were 4 categories of words: early acquiring emotional words (EE), early acquiring non-emotional words (ENE), late acquiring emotional words (LE) and late acquiring non-emotional words (LNE). A total of 40 words in each category was used. Early acquiring words were acquired before 5 years of age and late acquiring words were acquired after 7 years of age. The word stimuli were taken from the normative developmental dataset for emotion vocabulary comprehension (Baron-Cohen, Golan, Wheelwright, Granader, & Hill, 2010). The nonwords were selected from ARC nonword database (Rastle, Harrington, & Coltheart, 2002). A total of 120 nonwords were used. The stimuli were presented in a dual lexical decision task where two letter strings were presented on the screen. For half of the trials (80), both the strings were words and for the remaining half (80) either one or both of the letter strings were nonwords. When both the strings were words, they belonged to the same category of words (EE, ENE, LE, LNE). There were 20 trials for each category of words. Procedure Participants were tested in the classroom during their tutorial. They were instructed to tap the left side of the screen if both the letter strings they saw were words and to tap the right side of the screen if any of the letter strings were nonwords. Each trial started with a fixation cross; 500 ms after the fixation cross two letter strings were presented on the screen. The trial ended after the participant made a response. If there was no response made by the participant within 3 seconds after the stimulus presentation, the trial was terminated. The inter trial interval was 1 second. Feedback was provided for incorrect trials. The trials were presented in a random order for each participant. Stimulus presentation and response collection was controlled by Presentation Mobile App (Neurobehavioral Systems Inc., CA, USA) running on the participants’ mobile device (iOS or Android). The experiment took 5-10 minutes to complete. The accuracy and response time were calculated. Reaction time (RT) data from participants who had an accuracy of 80% or more were further analysed. Results Assumption of normality was met for the reaction time data. A two-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was computed with the factors age of acquisition of words (early, late) and emotional nature of the words (emotional, non-emotional). The ANOVA revealed a significant effect of age of acquisition of words F(1, 374) = 669.58, p < .05.="" early="" acquiring="" words="" were="" accessed="" significantly="" faster="" (mean="" rt="837.52" ms,="" se="7.36)" than="" late="" acquiring="" words="" (mean="" rt="961.49" ms,="" se="9.20)." the="" effect="" of="" emotional="" nature="" of="" the="" words="" was="" also="" significant="" f(1,="" 374)="18.53," p="">< .05.="" emotional="" words="" were="" accessed="" significantly="" faster="" (mean="" rt="890.56" ms,="" se="8.44)" than="" non-emotional="" words="" (mean="" rt="908.45" ms,="" se="8.04)." the="" interaction="" between="" age="" of="" acquisition="" and="" emotional="" nature="" of="" words="" was="" not="" significant="" f(1,="" 374)="0.40," p=""> .05, suggesting that the effect of emotional nature of words was similar for both early and late acquiring words. SHORT REPORT Emotion words and categories: evidence from lexical decision Graham G. Scott • Patrick J. O’Donnell • Sara C. Sereno Received: 29 April 2013 / Accepted: 5 November 2013 / Published online: 21 November 2013 � Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract We examined the categorical nature of emo- tion word recognition. Positive, negative, and neutral words were presented in lexical decision tasks. Word fre- quency was additionally manipulated. In Experiment 1, ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘negative’’ categories of words were implicitly indicated by the blocked design employed. A significant emotion–frequency interaction was obtained, replicating past research. While positive words consistently elicited faster responses than neutral words, only low fre- quency negative words demonstrated a similar advantage. In Experiments 2a and 2b, explicit categories (‘‘positive,’’ ‘‘negative,’’ and ‘‘household’’ items) were specified to participants. Positive words again elicited faster responses than did neutral words. Responses to negative words, however, were no different than those to neutral words, regardless of their frequency. The overall pattern of effects indicates that positive words are always facilitated, fre- quency plays a greater role in the recognition of negative words, and a ‘‘negative’’ category represents a somewhat disparate set of emotions. These results support the notion that emotion word processing may be moderated by dis- tinct systems. Keywords Emotion � Word frequency � Category � Lexical decision � Arousal � Valence Introduction Recent word recognition research has reported an interaction between a word’s emotional quality (characterized as posi- tive, negative, or neutral) and its frequency of occurrence (having a higher or lower prevalence of use). These results were found in lexical decision reaction times (Kuchinke et al. 2007; Scott et al. 2009), in electrophysiological voltages (Scott et al. 2009), as well as in eye fixation times during fluent reading (Scott et al. 2012). Specifically, for low fre- quency (LF) words, behavioral responses to both positive and negative words were faster than those to neutral words; for high frequency (HF) words, responses to positive words alone were faster than those to either negative or neutral words (which did not differ). Early word frequency effects have consistently been demonstrated in eye movement and electrophysiological paradigms (see Hand et al. 2010), and are considered to reliably indicate lexical access (e.g., Sereno and Rayner 2003). Thus, an interaction of a word’s emotional quality with its frequency suggests a central role of emotion in the initial stages of word recognition. The underlying theoretical mechanisms of emotion word processing, however, are less well understood. One account is derived from Taylor’s (1991) two-stage mobilization- minimization hypothesis, developed from McGinnies’ (1949) theory of perceptual defense (see also Pratto and John’s (1991) automatic vigilance hypothesis). Because of their high arousal, emotion words are initially facilitated relative to neutral words. Potential negative consequences of such emotional content, however, are guarded against by delaying their processing to provide time to diminish their impact. Accordingly, although both positive and negative words enjoy an initial advantage, negative words are sub- sequently inhibited. Scott et al. (2009) further suggested that minimization could be stronger for HF than LF negative G. G. Scott Division of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley PA1 2BE, UK P. J. O’Donnell � S. C. Sereno (&) Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Glasgow, 58 Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QB, UK e-mail: Sara.Sereno@glasgow.ac.uk 123 Cogn Process (2014) 15:209–215 DOI 10.1007/s10339-013-0589-6 words because, by definition, HF concepts are more salient. An alternative explanation for the differential pattern of responses to HF and LF negative words is based on the clinical notion of desensitization. In their ‘‘boy who cried wolf’’ hypothesis, Scott et al. (2012) proposed that the rela- tive slowness of responses to HF negative words may be because their negative semantics are diluted or lost through repeated exposure. Thus, while such words are consciously considered as negative in off-line rating tasks, on-line task performance may be more closely linked to automatic word recognition processes in which only vestigial emotional activations are elicited. Emotion words are typically characterized by their dual properties of arousal (internal activation) and valence (value or worth). In comparison with neutral words, emotion words have high arousal values correlated with extreme valence (e.g., Bradley and Lang 1999; see also the circumplex model of Russell 1980). While emotion words reside at polar opposites of a valence continuum, the question remains as to whether positive and negative words comprise a single ‘‘emotion’’ category or form independent categories. For example, some researchers suggest that the relationship between valence and recognition is linear, extending over a single dimension (e.g., Kousta et al. 2009; Larsen et al. 2008), while others maintain it is categorical, with distinct positive and negative types (e.g., Estes and Adelman 2008a, b). Research into the organization and representation of categories has demonstrated selective facilitation of cate- gory members across a variety of paradigms and measures (e.g., Bermeitinger et al. 2011; Sachs et al. 2008; Segalowitz and Zheng 2009). Moreover, what defines a category (e.g., Barsalou 1983) and whether a category is established implicitly or explicitly, for example, via the context afforded by a list of related items or by an encompassing label (e.g., Bazzanella and Bouquet 2011; Becker 1980; Schacter and Badgaiyan 2001), has implications for the amount of benefit conferred on its members. To investigate the categorical nature of emotion word processing, we designed a series of lexical decision experi- ments that all additionally manipulated word frequency, in particular, because of its differential effect on responses to negative words. In the prior emotion 9 frequency lexical decision studies, positive and negative words were inter- mixed with neutral words within a single block. In our first study (Experiment 1), we examined whether the same pattern of effects would be obtained under conditions of implicit categorical priming—when positive and negative words were presented in separate blocks. In the subsequent two studies, we examined the effect of explicit category priming, comparing responses to words belonging to the neutral cat- egory of ‘‘household’’ items to those within the category of either ‘‘positive’’ (Experiment 2a) or ‘‘negative’’ (Experi- ment 2b) items. In the Kuchinke et al. (2007) and Scott et al. (2009) experiments (as in most emotion word experiments and in our Experiment 1), neutral words did not form a coherent category; they were simply items that shared the characteristics of low arousal and intermediate valence. Thus, it is possible that the response time advantage found for (most) emotion over neutral words may be due in part to unbalanced implicit categorical priming across conditions, where a greater degree of semantic links exist between a selection of emotion versus neutral words. Consequently, while explicit category priming should facilitate the pro- cessing of all word types, this effect may appear more pro- nounced for neutral words. We expected that the current set of experiments would provide complementary results. That is,