Are all negative words alike? Behavioral differences in processing negative words associated and not associated with physical and social pain.

Studies examining whether stimulus valence affects cognitive processing and motor responses yield mixed results, possibly due to treating negative words as a homogeneous category. Words related to pain may hold distinct status because of their relevance to survival. Thus, they offer a unique opportunity to investigate semantic influences on cognitive processing.

Electrophysiological correlates of semantic pain processing in the affective priming.

Introduction: Pain plays a fundamental role in the well-being of the individual, and its semantic content may have specific properties compared to other negative domains (i.e., fear and anger) which allows the cognitive system to detect it with priority.

Event-related potential correlates of implicit processing of own- and other-race faces in children.

Human adults typically experience difficulties in recognizing and discriminating individual faces belonging to racial groups other than their own. The origin of this "other-race" effect is set in infancy, but the understanding of its developmental course is fragmented. We aimed to access the mechanisms of the other-race effect in childhood by unraveling the neural time course of own- and other-race face processing during a masked priming paradigm.

Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias.

The aim of the study was to explore the nature of the gender-congruency effect, characterized by a facilitation on the processing of congruent words in grammatical gender. Moreover, we explored whether resemblances between gender identities and gender attitudes with grammatical gender modulated lexical processing. We designed a gender-priming paradigm in Spanish, in which participants decided the gender of a masculine or feminine pronoun preceded by three different primes: biological gender nouns (mapping biological sex), stereotypical nouns (mapping biological and stereotypical information), and epicene nouns (arbitrary gender assignment).

Neural timing of the other-race effect across the lifespan: A review.

Face race influences the way we process faces, so that faces of a different ethnic group are processed for identity less efficiently than faces of one's ethnic group - a phenomenon known as the Other-Race Effect (ORE). Although widely replicated, the ORE is still poorly characterized in terms of its development and the underlying mechanisms. In the last two decades, the Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique has brought insight into the mechanisms underlying the ORE and has demonstrated potential to clarify its development.

Electrophysiological correlates of unconscious processes of race.

The study aimed to examine the neural mechanisms underlying implicit other-race face processing by the use of the masked and unmasked priming manipulation. Two types of prime-target pairs were presented while recording Event-related potentials (ERPs): Same face pairs (prime-target were identical faces), and Different face pairs (prime-target were different faces). Prime-target pairs were half Asian (other-race) and half Caucasian (own-race) faces.

How Individuals With Down Syndrome Process Faces and Words Conveying Emotions? Evidence From a Priming Paradigm.

Emotion recognition from facial expressions and words conveying emotions is considered crucial for the development of interpersonal relations (Pochon and Declercq, 2013). Although Down syndrome (DS) has received growing attention in the last two decades, emotional development has remained underexplored, perhaps because of the stereotype of high sociability in persons with DS. Yet recently, there is some literature that is suggesting the existence of specific deficits in emotion recognition in DS.

Basic composition and enriched integration in idiom processing: An EEG study.

We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., break the ice) are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation.

The Responders' Gender Stereotypes Modulate the Strategic Decision-Making of Proposers Playing the Ultimatum Game.

Despite the wealth of studies investigating factors affecting decisions, not much is known about the impact of stereotypical beliefs on strategic economic decision-making. In the present study, we used the ultimatum game paradigm to investigate how participants playing as proposer modulate their strategic economic behavior, according to their game counterparts' stereotypical identity (i.e.

Implicit Processing of the Eyes and Mouth: Evidence from Human Electrophysiology.

The current study examined the time course of implicit processing of distinct facial features and the associate event-related potential (ERP) components. To this end, we used a masked priming paradigm to investigate implicit processing of the eyes and mouth in upright and inverted faces, using a prime duration of 33 ms. Two types of prime-target pairs were used: 1.

Gender stereotypes across the ages: On-line processing in school-age children, young and older adults.

Most research to date on implicit gender stereotyping has been conducted with one age group - young adults. The mechanisms that underlie the on-line processing of stereotypical information in other age groups have received very little attention. This is the first study to investigate real time processing of gender stereotypes at different age levels.

Sex and the money--How gender stereotypes modulate economic decision-making: An ERP study.

In the present event-related potential study, we investigated whether and how participants playing the ultimatum game as responders modulate their decisions according to the proposers' stereotypical identity. The proposers' identity was manipulated using occupational role nouns stereotypically marked with gender (e.g.

Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian.

Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding the wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs.

Is black always the opposite of white? An investigation on the comprehension of antonyms in people with schizophrenia and in healthy participants.

The present investigation sought to expand our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying the recognition of antonyms and to evaluate whether these processes differed in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Antonymy is the most robust of the lexico-semantic relations and is relevant to both the mental organization of the lexicon and the organization of coherent discourse, as attested by the resurgence of interest in antonymy in the linguistic and psychological domains. In contrast, the vast literature on semantic processing in schizophrenia almost ignored antonymy.

Is the comprehension of idiomatic sentences indeed impaired in paranoid Schizophrenia? A window into semantic processing deficits.

Schizophrenia patients have been reported to be more impaired in comprehending non-literal than literal language since early studies on proverbs. Preference for literal rather than figurative interpretations continues to be documented. The main aim of this study was to establish whether patients are indeed able to use combinatorial semantic processing to comprehend literal sentences and both combinatorial analysis, and retrieval of pre-stored meanings to comprehend idiomatic sentences.

The interaction between language and visual spatial attention systems in grammatical gender processing. An N2pc study.

This ERP study employed an N2pc paradigm to investigate possible functional interactions between mechanisms of visual spatial attention and grammatical gender processing. Previous studies showed that the N2pc, an attention-related ERP component, can be modulated by lexical-semantic variables. However, it remains to be seen whether the N2pc can be affected by grammatical features as well.

Motor activation in literal and non-literal sentences: does time matter?

Despite the impressive amount of evidence showing involvement of the sensorimotor systems in language processing, important questions remain unsolved among which the relationship between non-literal uses of language and sensorimotor activation. The literature did not yet provide a univocal answer on whether the comprehension of non-literal, abstract motion sentences engages the same neural networks recruited for literal sentences. A previous TMS study using the same experimental materials of the present study showed activation for literal, fictive and metaphoric motion sentences but not for idiomatic ones.

The electrophysiological underpinnings of processing gender stereotypes in language.

Despite the widely documented influence of gender stereotypes on social behaviour, little is known about the electrophysiological substrates engaged in the processing of such information when conveyed by language. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we examined the brain response to third-person pronouns (lei "she" and lui "he") that were implicitly primed by definitional (passeggera(FEM) "passenger", pensionato(MASC) "pensioner"), or stereotypical antecedents (insegnante "teacher", conducente "driver"). An N400-like effect on the pronoun emerged when it was preceded by a definitionally incongruent prime (passeggera(FEM)--lui; pensionato(MASC)--lei), and a stereotypically incongruent prime for masculine pronouns only (insegnante--lui).

Event-related potential evidence for two functionally dissociable sources of semantic effects in the attentional blink.

Three target words (T1, T2, and T3) were embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream of non-word distractors, and participants were required to report the targets at the end of each RSVP stream. T2 and T3 were semantically related words in half of the RSVP streams, and semantically unrelated words in the other half of the RSVP streams. Using an identical design, a recent study reported distinct reflections of the T2-T3 semantic relationship on the P2 and N400 components of event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to T3, suggesting an early, automatic, source of P2 semantic effects and a late, controlled, source of N400 semantic effects.

Bidirectional semantic priming in the attentional blink.

The time course of semantic priming between two associated words was tracked using rapid serial visual presentation of two synchronized streams of stimuli appearing at about 20 items/sec, each stream including a target word. The two words were semantically related or unrelated and were separated by stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0-213 msec. Accuracy in reporting the first target (T1) versus the second target (T2) has been shown to interact dramatically with SOA over this range.