1,854
Views
1
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Brief Articles

Emotions, fast and slow: processing of emotion words is affected by individual differences in need for affect and narrative absorption

ORCID Icon, & ORCID Icon
Pages 997-1005 | Received 24 Oct 2022, Accepted 15 May 2023, Published online: 26 May 2023
 

ABSTRACT

Emotional words have consistently been shown to be processed differently than neutral words. However, few studies have examined individual variability in emotion word processing with longer, ecologically valid stimuli (beyond isolated words, sentences, or paragraphs). In the current study, we re-analysed eye-tracking data collected during story reading to reveal how individual differences in need for affect and narrative absorption impact the speed of emotion word reading. Word emotionality was indexed by affective-aesthetic potentials (AAP) calculated by a sentiment analysis tool. We found that individuals with higher levels of need for affect and narrative absorption read positive words more slowly. On the other hand, these individual differences did not influence the reading time of more negative words, suggesting that high need for affect and narrative absorption are characterised by a positivity bias only. In general, unlike most previous studies using more isolated emotion word stimuli, we observed a quadratic (U-shaped) effect of word emotionality on reading speed, such that both positive and negative words were processed more slowly than neutral words. Taken together, this study emphasises the importance of taking into account individual differences and task context when studying emotion word processing.

Acknowledgements

We thank Arthur Jacobs for providing us with the Dutch SentiArt table.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data supporting the results of this study are publicly available: https://doi.org/10.34973/zb8x-xe75. The analysis script and data files supporting the results of this study are available as well: https://osf.io/64mdz/.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.