在语言的神经认知研究中,手头的系统的处理原则通常被认为是相对不变的。然而,注意力研究,记忆,决策,社会判断表明,情绪可以大大调节大脑处理信息的方式。例如,心情不好,人们通常关注的焦点较窄,对启发式的依赖较少。面对大脑其他地方普遍存在的情绪影响,语言处理似乎不太可能保持不变。在脑电图实验中,在参与者阅读文本之前,我们操纵了他们的情绪,这些文本确认或不确认了基于动词的下一个讨论谁的期望(例如,大卫称赞琳达是因为...“会继续谈论琳达,不是大卫),或尊重或违反句法协议规则(例如,\"Theboysturns\").ERPs显示情绪对句法分析影响不大,但确实大大影响了参考预期:而读者在心情好的时候预期关于特定人的信息,坏心情完全消除了这种预期。一项行为跟踪实验表明,不良情绪本身不会干扰基于动词的期望,但是阻止读者快速使用这些信息来预测即将到来的参考,随着句子的展开。总之,我们的结果揭示了背景情绪,一种相当不引人注目的情感状态,有选择地改变实时语言处理的一个关键方面。这一观察结果与语言处理和情感(情绪,preferences,态度,心情),更普遍地证明了研究“冷”认知功能与大脑“热”方面的重要性。
In neurocognitive research on language, the processing principles of the system at hand are usually assumed to be relatively invariant. However, research on attention, memory, decision-making, and social judgment has shown that mood can substantially modulate how the brain processes information. For example, in a bad mood, people typically have a narrower focus of attention and rely less on heuristics. In the face of such pervasive mood effects elsewhere in the brain, it seems unlikely that language processing would remain untouched. In an EEG experiment, we manipulated the mood of participants just before they read texts that confirmed or disconfirmed verb-based expectations about who would be talked about next (e.g., that \"David praised Linda because … \" would continue about Linda, not David), or that respected or violated a syntactic agreement rule (e.g., \"The boys turns\"). ERPs showed that mood had little effect on syntactic parsing, but did substantially affect referential anticipation: whereas readers anticipated information about a specific person when they were in a good mood, a bad mood completely abolished such anticipation. A behavioral follow-up experiment suggested that a bad mood did not interfere with verb-based expectations per se, but prevented readers from using that information rapidly enough to predict upcoming reference on the fly, as the sentence unfolds. In all, our results reveal that background mood, a rather unobtrusive affective state, selectively changes a crucial aspect of real-time language processing. This observation fits well with other observed interactions between language processing and affect (emotions, preferences, attitudes, mood), and more generally testifies to the importance of studying \"cold\" cognitive functions in relation to \"hot\" aspects of the brain.