中性抽象词和具体词情绪信息获得的差异

Differences of Emotional Information Acquisition between Neutral Concrete and Abstract Words

采用词汇迫选学习范式考察中性词情绪信息的获得过程,比较抽象词和具体词情绪信息获得的差异。在学习阶段,被试从与情绪图片同时呈现的两个中性具体或抽象词中任意选择一个与图片情绪匹配;在测试阶段,被试对先前呈现的词汇进行喜好度评定。结果发现:(1)在迫选过程中与积极图片匹配的具体词喜好度显著高于与消极图片匹配的具体词喜好度,而抽象词学习并未表现出这样的效应。(2)积极图片下被选择词汇的喜好度显著高于未被选择词汇的喜好度,而消极图片下被选择与未被选择词汇的喜好度差异不显著。这说明具体词较抽象词更易获得相应的情绪信息,积极情绪比消极情绪信息更易被习得。

The relationship between emotion and language has become a hot topic for more and more researchers. Emotional words not only contain conceptual but also affective meanings, which provide an excellent way to investigate the interactions of emotion and language. Previous studies have proved that the affective information can influence the process of emotional word per se or adjacent stimuli. However, there is little study investigating the process of the acquisition of words’ emotional information up to now. The present study aimed to explore whether neutral words in different emotional backgrounds could obtain a certain kind of emotional information, so to become a negative word in negative emotional background. We also focused on whether there were differences between neutral concrete words and neutral abstract words on the process of emotion acquisition.We used lexical force-choice paradigm to investigate the process of the effect of emotional meaning on neutral words and the modulation effect of concreteness. 36 college students participated in experiment 1 and their average age is 20.35 ± 1.56. Experimental materials were neutral concrete words, neutral abstract words and different types of affective pictures, including positive and negative pictures（selected from International Affective Picture System）. Firstly, we chose 10 participants who did not engage in the formal experiment to evaluate 400 words from The modern Chinese vocabulary dictionary based on their concreteness and emotionality. According to their assessment, we chose 100 neutral concrete words and 100 neutral abstract words as the experimental materials. The formal experiment was divided into two stages： emotion learning stage and word preference rating stage. In the emotion learning stage, subjects were asked to choose one word to match with the picture’s emotional meaning from the two, which were displayed under an emotional picture. Subsequently, a 2-minute distraction task was implemented to prevent memory effect. In the word preference rating stage, participants needed to evaluate how much they liked the words that had displayed in previous stage on a Likert 9-point scale（1 meant extremely not liking, and 9 meant extremely liking）. We conducted a 2（words： neutral concrete words, neutral abstract words） × 2（emotion： positive, negative） × 2（category of choices： selected, non-selected） experimental design, the dependent variable was the scores of the word’s degree of liking. The results showed that（1） The degrees of liking were significantly different between selected words and non-selected words. For neutral concrete words, the words chosen under positive pictures were rated higher in the scores of the degree of liking than those selected under negative pictures. For neutral abstract words, however, there was no such effect.（2） The selected words were rated higher in the scores of the degree of liking than those not selected when paired with positive pictures, there was no difference when paired with negative pictures. In experiment 2, we incorporated neutral pictures into our study to investigate if there were differences between selected words and non-selected words when paired with neutral pictures. The results were roughly consistent with experiment 1 and there was no difference between selected words and non-selected words when paired with neutral pictures. In the whole, the results suggested that concrete words were more easily to obtain corresponding emotional meanings compared to abstract words, and positive emotion was more easily to be learned versus negative emotion.In summary, neutral words obtained corresponding emotion in different emotion backgrounds when they were selected in the force-choice task, the establishment of words and emotion backgrounds’ arbitrary connection was the mechanism of emotional information acquisition. Concreteness modulated the acquisition and the processing of words’ emotional information.