The early negative bias of social semantics: evidence from behavioral and ERP studies

BACKGROUND: Compared to nonsocial information, the human brain is more highly sensitive to social information. As a kind of typical social semantic information, the words describing person traits differ from the nonsocial semantic information describing inanimate objects in many ways. It remains to be seen whether the processing of trait words has a valence asymmetric and whether it differs from the processing of nonsocial semantic information in terms of behavioral responses and neural temporal processes. METHOD: Taking person and object names as priming stimuli and adjective words only used for describing humans or objects as target stimuli, the present study aimed to investigate the processing characteristics of social and nonsocial semantic information by recording both behavioral and ERP data. RESULTS: Behavioral results showed that the response times for negative words were significantly slower than those for positive words whether for social or nonsocial semantic information. The accuracy rates of negative words were significantly lower than those of positive words when the targets were social words which is contrary to the nonsocial words. The ERP results indicated that there was a negative bias effect on the processing of both types of information during the whole time course of brain neural activity; that is, the P2, N400, and LPP amplitudes elicited by negative words were larger than those elicited by positive words; However, the negative bias effect of social semantic information started at the early perceptual stage which was significantly earlier than the onset of negative bias of nonsocial semantic information, and was significantly affected by the prime type. In addition, there was a significant semantic conflict N400 effect only for nonsocial semantic information. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the present study revealed the existence of an early negative bias of social information and provided evidence for the specificity of social information. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-023-01286-0.