TY - JOUR
T1 - Personality Traits and Emotional Word Recognition
T2 - An ERP Study
AU - Ku, Li Chuan
AU - Chan, Shiao hui
AU - Lai, Vicky T.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., under the Grant No. MOST 103-2410-H-003 -141 -MY3 to S.C. The authors thank the lab members of Neurolinguistics Lab in the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, for their assistance in data collection. The data and materials for the experiment are available through the author Li-Chuan Ku (lchnku@gmail.com), and the experiment was not preregistered.
Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C., under the Grant No. MOST 103-2410-H-003 -141 -MY3 to S.C. The authors thank the lab members of Neurolinguistics Lab in the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, for their assistance in data collection.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
PY - 2020/4/1
Y1 - 2020/4/1
N2 - Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of positive, neutral, and negative words that were matched for arousal. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from healthy participants while they performed a lexical decision task. We found that personality traits influenced emotional word recognition at N400 (300-450 ms) and LPC (450-800 ms). At the earlier (N400) stage, the more extraverted and neurotic a participant was, the more reduced the N400s for the positive words relative to neutral words were. This suggests that the extroverts and high neurotics (i.e., high impulsivity) identified positive content in words during lexical feature retrieval, which facilitated such retrieval. At the later (LPC) stage, both the introverts and high neurotics (i.e., high anxiety) showed greater LPCs to negative than neutral words, indicating their sustained attention and elaborative processing of negative information. These results suggest that extraversion and neuroticism collectively influence different stages of emotional word recognition in a way that is consistent with Gray’s biopsychological theory of personality.
AB - Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of positive, neutral, and negative words that were matched for arousal. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from healthy participants while they performed a lexical decision task. We found that personality traits influenced emotional word recognition at N400 (300-450 ms) and LPC (450-800 ms). At the earlier (N400) stage, the more extraverted and neurotic a participant was, the more reduced the N400s for the positive words relative to neutral words were. This suggests that the extroverts and high neurotics (i.e., high impulsivity) identified positive content in words during lexical feature retrieval, which facilitated such retrieval. At the later (LPC) stage, both the introverts and high neurotics (i.e., high anxiety) showed greater LPCs to negative than neutral words, indicating their sustained attention and elaborative processing of negative information. These results suggest that extraversion and neuroticism collectively influence different stages of emotional word recognition in a way that is consistent with Gray’s biopsychological theory of personality.
KW - Anxiety
KW - Emotional words
KW - Event-related potentials
KW - Extraversion
KW - Impulsivity
KW - Neuroticism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081005836&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85081005836&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3758/s13415-020-00774-9
DO - 10.3758/s13415-020-00774-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 32103428
AN - SCOPUS:85081005836
SN - 1530-7026
VL - 20
SP - 371
EP - 386
JO - Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience
JF - Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience
IS - 2
ER -