Affect as Anaesthetic: how emotional contexts modulate the processing of counterintuitive concepts

ABSTRACT

In popular narratives, minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCIs), which violate one category of our real-world knowledge (e.g. talking trees), are frequently embedded in emotional contexts. To assess the impact of emotion on MCI processing, we presented micro-narratives with negative or neutral contents before target sentences. We compared electrophysiological correlates of semantic processing elicited by MCIs, common semantic expectancy violations, and intuitive concepts, presented as critical within-sentence words and as images after the sentences. Results show that emotional contexts play a critical role for MCI processing. N400 effects in neural responses to MCIs that we observed after neutral contexts were not found after negative contexts, suggesting that the synergy between emotional context and MCI saliency enhances the processing of narratives at the cost of critical semantic processing. This finding is relevant for neurocognitive models of language comprehension in high-level contexts, for our understanding of the attraction of counterintuitive concepts and rhetorical strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Counterfactual information
• emotional story-context
• event-related potentials
• critical semantic analysis

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of a cooperation between scholars from psychology, aesthetics, and literature. It was made possible through the support of the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the German Excellence Initiative. We would like to thank Arthur Jacobs and Winfried Menninghaus for valuable input, and Nancy König and Juliane Schmidt for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 An additional exploratory analysis of a narrower time window between 250 and 350 ms revealed no significant main effects or interactions, all Fs < 2.25, all ps > .113, and no significant follow-up contrasts between MCIs and intuitive concepts or between violations and intuitive concepts within either of the two contexts (emotionally negative or neutral), all ps > .159. This is in contrast with our main analysis (150–350 ms) but might be explained by the fact that the single trial ERPs had a lower signal-to-noise ratio when averaging across a 100 ms time window as compared to a 200 ms time window.

2 For pictures, the effects observed may also involve another ERP component, the N300 (N300/N400 complex). Comparable with the N400 for word stimuli, the N300 is sensitive to semantic relatedness and semantic congruency with context, being larger for unrelated and incongruous pictures. Usually, the N300 has a more anterior distribution than the N400, as well as an earlier onset. It is assumed to reflect semantic encoding, which is often more direct for pictures than for words (e.g., McPherson & Holcomb, 1999; Sitnikova et al., 2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’ at the Freie Universität BCluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’ at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’ at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)erlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) “Languages of Emotion” at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The complete code for data analyses is available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/f3ekq/.