In recent years, several ERP studies have investigated whether the early computation of agreement is permeable to the emotional content of words. Some studies have reported interactive effects of grammaticality and emotionality in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component, while others have failed to replicate these results. Furthermore, novel findings suggest that grammatical processing can elicit different neural patterns across individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe emotional connotation of words is known to affect word and sentence processing. However, the when and how of the interaction between emotion and grammar are still up for debate. In this behavioural experiment, 35 female university students read noun phrases (NPs) composed by a determiner and a noun in their L1 (Spanish), and were asked to indicate if the NPs were grammatically correct (el camarero) or not (*la tornillo; i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe main objective of this study was to examine the moderating or buffering effect of social support (SS) perceived by university students on the psychological impact of lockdown on mental health. Specifically, a total of 826 participants (622 women) completed an online survey that included standardized measures of anxiety (Generalised Anxiety Disorder-7), depression (Patient Health Questionnaire-9), and irritability (Brief Irritability Test), as well as measures of stressors, perceived SS, and self-perceived change in mental health. The results of hierarchical regression analyses suggest that SS contributes toward attenuating the negative impact of academic stressors, general overload, and interpersonal conflict on the indicators of psychological well-being; however, moderation analysis only confirms the buffering effect for symptoms of anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany studies have found that the emotional content of words affects visual word recognition. However, most of them have only considered affective valence, finding inconsistencies regarding the direction of the effects, especially in unpleasant words. Recent studies suggest that arousal might explain why not all unpleasant words elicit the same behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn increasing number of studies have addressed the psychological impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the general population. Nevertheless, far less is known about the impact on specific populations such as university students, whose psychological vulnerability has been shown in previous research. This study sought to examine different indicators of mental health in university students during the Spanish lockdown; we also analyzed the main sources of stress perceived by students in relation to the COVID-19 crisis, and the coping strategies adopted when faced with the situation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this study we examine the extent to which aspects such as the emotionality coded in words may interfere with the processing of gender agreement errors in a sentence grammaticality judgement task. We follow the methodological pattern of our previous experiments, using consistently the same kind of structure and task (gender agreement) and only emotional (pleasant vs unpleasant) words, in an attempt to clarify whether neural correlates and performance show similar patterns in positive and negative words. We found an emotional effect in the N400 time window for unpleasant adjectives as well as the classic grammaticality effects in the left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600 components.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe present here emoFinder ( http://usc.es/pcc/emofinder ), a Web-based search engine for Spanish word properties taken from different normative databases. The tool incorporates several subjective word properties for 16,375 distinct words.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the last decades it has been shown that two components of the event-related potentials (ERPs), the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and the P300, reflect the evaluation of the outcomes of a given course of action. Within the reinforcement learning theory, the prevailing interpretation of the relationship between FRN and P300 is the classical "independent coding model". This model proposes that the FRN is only sensitive to feedback valence whereas the P300 is only sensitive to feedback magnitude.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPerformance monitoring is an executive function, which we depend on for detecting and evaluating the consequences of our behavior. Although event related potentials (ERPs) have revealed the existence of differences after correct and incorrect decisions, it is not known whether there is a trial-by-trial representation of the accuracy of the decision. We recorded the electroencephalographic activity (EEG) while participants performed a perceptual discrimination task, with two levels of difficulty, in which they received immediate feedback.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Integr Neurosci
November 2011
Although the premotor (PM) cortex was once viewed as the substrate of pure motor functions, soon it was realized that it was involved in higher brain functions. By this it is meant that the PM cortex functions would better be explained as motor set, preparation for limb movement, or sensory guidance of movement rather than solely by a fixed link to motor performance. These findings, together with a better knowledge of the PM cortex histology and hodology in human and non-human primates prompted quantitative studies of this area combining behavioral tasks with electrophysiological recordings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article present the Spanish assessments of the 111 sounds included in the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS; Bradley & Lang, 1999b). The sounds were evaluated by 159 participants in the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using a computer version of the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley & Lang, 1994). Results are compared with those obtained in the American version of the IADS, as well as in the Spanish adaptations of the International Affective Picture System (P.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article presents the Spanish adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999). The norms are based on 720 participants' assessments of the translation into Spanish of the 1,034 words included in the ANEW. The evaluations were done in the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM).
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