Clear judgments based on unclear evidence: Person evaluation is strongly influenced by untrustworthy gossip.

Affective information about other people's social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumors, lies, or "fake news." Here, we investigated how spontaneous person likability and explicit person judgments are influenced by trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indices of emotional brain responses.

The closer they are, the more they interfere: Semantic similarity of word distractors increases competition in language production.

Heterogeneous effects of semantic distance in language production have sparked a debate on the central assumption of many language production models, namely that lexical selection is a competitive process. In the present ERP study, we manipulated semantic distance in the picture word interference (PWI) paradigm systematically within taxonomic hierarchies. Target-distractor pairs were either closely related members of the same basic level category, hence sharing many semantic features (e.

Cumulative semantic interference for associative relations in language production.

Associations between conceptual representations and thematic relations play an important role in the organization of semantic memory. However, language production research on semantic context effects shows that associative (e.g.

Listening to Puns Elicits the Co-Activation of Alternative Homophone Meanings during Language Production.

Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, presented in the form of puns, has an influence on the co-activation of unrelated meanings of homophones in a subsequent language production task.