Feel between the lines: implied emotion in sentence comprehension

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Vicky Tzuyin LaiPeter Hagoort

Abstract

This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, "The boy fell asleep and never woke up again," and their neutral counterparts "The boy stood up and grabbed his bag." This kind of negative sentence allows us to examine implied emotion derived at the sentence level, without associative emotion coming from word retrieval. We found that implied emotion in sentences, relative to neutral sentences, led to activation in some emotion-related areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the insula, as well as certain language-related areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus, which has been implicated in combinatorial processing. These results suggest that the emotional network involved in implied emotion is intricately related to the network for combinatorial processing in language, supporting the view that sentence meaning is more than simply concatenating the meanings of its lexical building blocks.

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Citations

May 1, 2016·Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience·Markus J van AckerenShirley-Ann Rueschemeyer
Oct 10, 2015·Neuropsychologia·Dalya SamurRoel M Willems
Oct 26, 2018·Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience·Yang CaoLin Wang
Dec 17, 2019·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Peter Hagoort
Jan 11, 2020·Behavior Research Methods·Francesca M M CitronNora Michaelis
Jun 20, 2018·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Rutvik H DesaiWessel van Dam
Jun 4, 2019·Neuropsychologia·Francesca M M CitronArthur M Jacobs

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