Electrophysiological and Behavioral Correlates of Valence, Arousal and Subjective Significance in the Lexical Decision Task

The emotional properties of words, such as valence and arousal, influence the way we perceive and process verbal stimuli. Recently, subjective significance was found to be an additional factor describing the activational aspect of emotional reactions, which is vital for the cognitive consequences of emotional stimuli processing. Subjective significance represents the form of mental activation specific to reflective mind processing. The Lexical Decision Task (LDT) is a paradigm allowing the investigation of the involuntary processing of meaning and differentiating this processing from the formal processing of the perceptual features of words. In this study, we wanted to search for the consequences of valence, arousal, and subjective significance for the involuntary processing of verbal stimuli meaning indexed by both behavioral measures (reaction latencies) and electrophysiological measures (Event-Related Potentials: ERPs). We expected subjective significance, as the reflective form of activation, to shorten response latencies in LDT. We also expected subjective significance to modulate the amplitude of the ERP FN400 component, reducing the negative-going deflection of the potential. We expected valence to shape the LPC component amplitude, differentiating between negative and positive valences, since the LPC indexes the meaning processing. Indeed, the results confirmed our expectations and showed that subjective significance is a factor independent from the arousal and valence that shapes the involuntary processing of verbal stimuli, especially the detection of a link between stimulus and meaning indexed by the FN400. Moreover, we found that the LPC amplitude was differentiated by valence level.