How Do Emotional Cues Modulate Readers' Perception of Emotional Arousal during Text Comprehension: An ERP Study

摘要

In an event-related potential experiment, we investigated how the amount and the location of emotional cues in the context influenced readers' perception of emotional arousal during reading comprehension. Participants read short narratives in which the amount of emotional cues and the location of emotional cues varied across conditions: a) the context contained two emotional cues, b) the context contained one emotional cue in the second sentence, c) the context contained one emotional cue in the first sentence, and d) the context contained no emotional cue. Our results showed that compared with contexts including one or no emotional cue, contexts including two emotional cues elicited a higher level of emotional arousal, as reflected by a larger anterior distributed LPP effect. However, the location of the emotional cue was found to have no effect on emotional arousal.