Emotion
2010, Vol. 10, No. 6, 863– 873
© 2010 American Psychological Association
1528-3542/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0019983
Discourse-Based Emotional Consistency Modulates Early and Middle
Components of Event-Related Potentials
Inmaculada León, José M. Dı́az, Manuel de Vega, and Juan A. Hernández
University of La Laguna
In this study, participants read stories describing emotional episodes with either a positive or negative
valence (Experiment 1). Following each story, participants were exposed to short sentences referring to
the protagonist, and the event-related potential (ERP) for each sentence’s last word was recorded. Some
sentences described the protagonist’s emotion, either consistent or inconsistent with the story; others
were neutral; and others involved a semantically anomalous word. Inconsistent emotions were found to
elicit larger N100/P200 and N400 than consistent emotions. However, when participants were exposed
to the same critical sentences in a control experiment (Experiment 2) in which the stories had been
removed, emotional consistency effects disappeared in all ERP components, demonstrating that these
effects were discourse-level phenomena. By contrast, the ordinary N400 effect for locally anomalous
words in the sentence was obtained both with and without story context. In conclusion, reading stories
describing events with emotional significance determines strong and very early anticipations of an
emotional word.
Keywords: emotion in discourse, N100, P200, emotional consistency
The present study explores how readers process emotional information in the context of short stories using the method of brain
event-related potentials (ERPs), which provide a higher temporal
resolution of comprehension processes than behavioral measures.
With this aim in mind, we collected the ERPs of emotional words
in sentences that were either consistent or inconsistent with a
previously read narrative. The ERP sensitivity to this emotional
consistency will provide clues to the discourse-level processing of
emotions.
Discourse frequently conveys emotional information that can be
actively processed by readers. This is particularly true for narratives in which readers might keep track of the protagonists’ emotions to build the story’s coherence. Some behavioral studies have
shown that readers are sensitive to the emotional tone of the events
in a story, deriving inferences about the protagonist’s emotions (de
Vega, Dı́az, & León, 1997; de Vega, León, & Dı́az, 1996; Gernsbacher, Goldsmith, & Robertson, 1992; Gygax, Garnhan, &
Oakhill, 2004). For instance, Gernsbacher et al. (1992) asked
participants to read a story in which the main character stole
money from a store where his best friend worked, and then later
learned that his friend had been fired. At the end of the story,
participants read a critical sentence that described the protagonist
either as feeling guilt (matching the implicit emotion) or pride
(mismatching the implicit emotion). Participants read the sentences with the word that matched the emotion induced by the
story faster than sentences with the mismatching emotion word. In
the same vein, readers are able to update the protagonist’s emotions as new events are described in narratives (de Vega et al.,
1996). For instance, an initial paragraph could bias the protagonist’s emotion of envy toward a secondary character’s success,
whereas a new paragraph describing a further character’s disgraceful events makes the reader update the protagonist’s emotion as
pity.
ERP Studies of Words in Discourse
There is a body of literature showing that ERP components are
sensitive to the processing of semantically anomalous words in
linguistic contexts (see review by Schirmer, 2007). In their pioneering studies, Kutas and Hillyard (1984) discovered an increased
negative wave peaking around 400 ms after the onset of words that
violated the semantic expectations generated by the linguistic
context (e.g., the word socks in the context: “He spread the warm
bread with socks”) compared with words consistent with the
sentence context (e.g., butter in the same sentence). This so-called
N400 component is considered a local context effect, because it is
observed for words that are inconsistent with the neighboring
words in the sentence, and it seems related to the ease with which
that word’s information is retrieved from memory (see the review
by Kutas, Federmeier, Coulson, King, & Münte, 2000).
However, sentences are usually part of a wider discourse, and
thus they need to be interpreted in the global context. The study of
discourse-level processes by means of ERP is a growing field in
the neuroscience of language (Coulson & Kutas, 2001; Federmeier
& Kutas, 1999; Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006; St. George,
Mannes, & Hoffman, 1997; van Berkum, Hagoort, & Brown,
1999; van Berkum, Zwitserlood, Hagoort, & Brown, 2003). Most
of these studies clearly demonstrated that N400 increases for
Inmaculada León, José M. Dı́az, Manuel de Vega, and Juan A. Hernández,
Facultad de Psicologı́a, University of La Laguna.
This research was supported by Grant SEJ2004-02360 from the Spanish
Ministry of Education to Manuel de Vega. We are grateful to Yurena
Morera and Mabel Urrutia for their help in data collection.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Inmaculada León, Facultad de Psicologı́a, Campus de Guajara, 38201 La Laguna,
Tenerife, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]
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LEÓN, DÍAZ, DE VEGA, AND HERNÁNDEZ
discourse-anomalous words. For instance, St. George et al. (1997)
gave readers short stories that were locally coherent. However, it
was difficult to realize what their topic was, unless they were
preceded by a title. In the study, for half of the stories, the readers
received the title, while for the other half, they did not. Content
words in stories without a title elicited a larger N400 than the same
words in stories with a title, demonstrating that this ERP component is sensitive to discourse-level processes. More recently, van
Berkum and his collaborators (van Berkum et al., 1999, 2003)
analyzed words that were locally consistent in the sentence context
(e.g., quick or slow in “Jane told her brother that he was exceptionally quick/slow”). One of these words (e.g., slow) was made
discourse-anomalous when the sentence was preceded by a previous narrative in which the brother’s behavior could better be
described as quick. The discourse-anomalous words elicited an
N400 beginning at about 200 –250 ms after the word onset and
with a centro-parietal distribution. This discourse-level N400 occurred with both written and auditory materials and was similar for
words placed at intermediate and final sentence positions.
Later components other than N400 are also sensitive to
discourse-related words, especially when the linguistic materials
involve complex semantics. For instance, the punch word in jokes
initially elicits an N400 as an ordinary brain response to semantic
inconsistency, but later on, in the 500 –900 ms time window, it
elicits a late frontal positivity that could be interpreted as a marker
of the shifting or reinterpretation process typical of getting the joke
(Coulson & Kutas, 2001). In the same vein, in the field of social
stereotypes, Osterhout, Bersick, and McLaughlin (1997) reported
that sentences with pronouns implying violation of gender stereotypes (e.g., The doctor prepared herself for the operation) elicited
a larger posterior positive potential than pronouns that are consistent with gender stereotypes. Finally, Bartholow, Fabiani, Gratton,
and Bettencourt (2001) also found a larger late positive potential
for final words of sentences describing a protagonist’s behavior
violating the expectations established by a previously read paragraph.
In sum, there is clear evidence that ERPs are sensitive to
discourse-level processes. First, when target words are discourseanomalous (even though they are appropriate in the local sentence
context), they elicit a larger N400 than discourse-consistent words.
Second, a few studies employing materials describing social or
interpersonal events reported a larger late positivity component,
probably related to the reprocessing or elaboration of unexpected
content.
ERP Studies of Emotional Words
Most ERP studies on language and emotion reported in the
literature have employed isolated emotional words as stimuli,
namely without any sentence or discourse context. A few of these
studies showed a modulation by emotional words of very early
ERP components. Thus, an enhanced electrophysiological response was observed 100 –140 ms after the onset of emotional
words presented in the right visual field (Ortigue et al., 2004). In
the same vein, unpleasant adjectives elicited more positive amplitude than pleasant adjectives, especially in the left hemisphere, in
several early ERP components, including P100, N100, and P200
(Bernat, Bunce, & Shevrin, 2001). Such early effects occurred
even under subliminal stimuli presentation, suggesting that very
rapid processing of emotional features of words can take place,
even before lexical access is complete. A few studies also reported
that emotional words modulate the early posterior negativity
(EPN) around 200 ms after the word onset (e.g., Carretié et al.,
2008; Kanske & Kotz, 2007; Kissler, Herbert, Pey, & Junghofer,
2007). EPN could be considered a signature of the initial semantic
categorization of words, which apparently is sensitive to their
emotionality.
However, the most frequently reported effect for emotional
words is the modulation of a late positive potential (LPP), in a time
window of 300 –900 ms after the word onset. Emotional words,
either pleasant or unpleasant, elicit a larger LPP than neutral words
(Knost, Flor, Braun, & Birbaumer, 1997; Naumann, Bartussek,
Diedrich, & Laufer, 1992; Williamson, Harpur, & Hare, 1991). For
instance, Naumann et al. (1992) provided participants with positive, negative, and neutral adjectives, and they found a larger LPP
component at fronto-central sites, which was only elicited if the
subject’s attention was drawn to the emotional content of the
stimuli.
Another important issue explored with emotional words concerns the so-called “negativity bias” (Ito & Cacioppo, 2000).
Generally speaking, unpleasant stimuli produce a more intensive
brain response than pleasant and neutral stimuli, probably because
they receive more attention, given the high adaptive value attributed to negatively valenced information (e.g., Huang & Luo, 2006;
Ito & Cacioppo, 2000; Kanske & Kotz, 2007). Thus, unpleasant
pictures elicit a larger LPP than pleasant pictures in categorization
tasks (Huang & Luo, 2006; Ito & Cacioppo, 2000). When it comes
to valenced words, however, the situation is more complex. Some
researchers have found a negativity bias in words similar to that
found in pictures. For instance, Kanske and Kotz (2007) reported
that unpleasant concrete words elicited a larger LPP component
than pleasant concrete words in a go/no go task, although this
negativity bias was not observed when the same words were
presented in a lexical-decision task. This suggests that a deep
processing of the stimulus is necessary to obtain the bias.
Another set of studies have shown a reversed “positivity bias,”
namely a larger electrophysiological response during the processing of positive words (Herbert, Junghofer, & Kissler, 2008; Herbert, Kissler, Junghofer, Peyk, & Rockstroh, 2006). In one study,
Herbert et al. (2006) employed a startle procedure: a tone was
introduced a few seconds after the onset of a pleasant, unpleasant
or neutral adjective. The auditory startle produced an enhanced
P300 component as well as an increased electromyographic eye
response only for pleasant words, indicating a long-term elaboration process for these valenced words. More recently, Herbert et al.
(2006) obtained reduced N400 and increased LPP for pleasant as
compared to unpleasant and neutral adjectives, using a rapid serial
visual presentation paradigm. This suggests that participants have
an attentional bias toward pleasant information, which, according
to the authors, is more self-relevant than unpleasant information.
Herbert et al. (2006) claim that the negativity bias more likely
occurs for high arousal stimuli (such as pictures), and involves
early (P200) ERP components. However, positive stimuli may
have an advantage in later elaborative processes. Some neuroimaging results are compatible with this proposal: while both pleasant and unpleasant nouns elicit activity in the left amygdala, only
pleasant words activate additional regions in the reward circuit of
the brain (Hamann & Mao, 2001). However, a recent study that
DISCOURSE-BASED EMOTIONAL CONSISTENCY
employed high arousal words (insults and compliments) did not
find any significant difference between pleasant and unpleasant
words at the LPP component (Carretié et al., 2008).
Finally, some studies combining the valence of words and the
evaluative context demonstrate that the consistency with the context in which the target valenced words are presented is as important as the valence per se. To test this idea, some studies employed
a variation of the oddball paradigm, in which ERPs were recorded
for a set of pleasant or unpleasant words (Cacioppo, Crites, Berntson, & Coles, 1993; Cacioppo, Crites, Gardner, & Berntson, 1994;
De Pascalis, Strippoli, Riccardi, & Vergari, 2004). The frequency
of positively and negatively valenced words in the set was manipulated. For instance, in a given set of stimuli, 80% had positive
valence (standard stimuli) and only 20% had negative valence
(target stimuli). In oddball studies, the unexpected target stimuli
(the less frequent ones) usually produce a larger P300 potential in
the ERPs. Similarly, in the experiments with emotional words, the
authors found a larger LPP for the less frequent (inconsistent with
the context) valenced words, with maximal amplitude over centroparietal areas.
In sum, the studies with emotional words have shown ERP
signatures associated with the emotional value of words. Some of
these ERP signatures are very early components, suggesting a
rapid prelexical processing of the emotional value of words. However, the most important of these signatures is the LPP, which
could be considered in some cases as an index of the elaborative
processes of recollection, and which is sensible to the emotional
features of words. First, LPP allows for distinguishing emotional
from neutral words. Second, in most studies, LPP is larger for
unpleasant than for pleasant words. Third, LPP is very sensitive to
contextual factors in which valenced words appear, being larger
for words with unexpected valence. Finally, a few studies have
also shown that the N400 component can be modulated by the
emotional parameters of words. Particularly, a reduction of N400
for pleasant words (or an increase for unpleasant words) has been
observed in some cases (e.g., Herbert et al., 2006).
The Present Study
The ERP effects observed for valenced words are important,
although they are constrained to isolated words or sets of words,
and involve explicit decision task demands such as categorical
evaluation or old/new recognition. However, the emotional dimension of linguistic meanings is not constrained to valenced words
and explicit evaluation tasks. As mentioned above, behavioral data
clearly indicate that readers are very sensitive to emotional sentences and stories. In addition, other studies have shown that ERPs
are sensitive to discourse-level expectations. What is lacking, as
far as we can ascertain, is the ERP analysis of discourse-level
effects associated with emotional content. The effects of context
on valenced words reported in the above experiments (Cacioppo et
al., 1993; Cacioppo et al., 1994; De Pascalis et al., 2004) correspond to cumulative contexts of isolated words, rather than discursive contexts.
The present study tries to fill this gap in the literature, using
ERPs to analyze emotional language in the context of discourse
and ordinary comprehension demands. In this study, participants
read stories followed by several critical sentences, some of which
described the protagonist’s emotions in a manner that was either
865
consistent or inconsistent with the events described in the story.
Given the prominence of the emotional dimension in narratives,
we hypothesized that stories cause readers to make strong inferences regarding the protagonist’s emotions, thereby modulating
expectation for the emotional words. The excellent temporal resolution of ERPs allows one to determine whether discourse-level
emotional inferences occur automatically at an early stage (indexed by N100, P200, EPN) or at a middle-late stage (N400), or
whether they involve posterior elaboration processes to repair
expectation violations (indexed by LPP).
Experiment 1 employed a paradigm similar to the one used by
Bartholow et al. (2001) to explore how people understand descriptions of behaviors either consistent or inconsistent with social
expectations created in a previous paragraph.1 In Experiment 1,
participants were asked to read short stories, half describing pleasant episodes occurring to the protagonist and the other half describing unpleasant episodes. After reading a story, participants
were given critical sentences, some of which described the protagonist’s emotional states in a manner that was either consistent
or inconsistent with the expectations derived from the events.
Other critical sentences, that is, neutral and semantically anomalous sentences, corresponded to different control conditions. There
were also continuation sentences immediately following each story
that served as links between the story context and the remaining
sentences. The continuation sentences kept the emotional tone of
the story, albeit without mentioning any emotion explicitly.
Experiment 2 was a control experiment in which the same
critical sentences were presented in isolation, namely without a
previous story context. The contrast between the two experiments
allowed us to determine the global context effects of discourse on
the comprehension of emotional sentences. Our expectations were
that emotional consistency effects would be observed in the story
context situation but not in the nonstory experiment. Specifically,
in Experiment 1, emotional sentences that violate the expectations
created by the episodes in the story would produce enhanced later
ERP components, such as N400 and LPP. These components
would be related to the additional resources required to integrate
emotionally inconsistent information with previous discourse. In
addition to the late ERP windows, earlier ERP components such as
N100, P100, P200, or EPN have occasionally been reported to be
sensitive to the automatic processing of emotions, even before
lexical access occurs. If we found that emotional consistency also
modulated these early components, this would support the idea of
a very rapid processing of emotional expectations during the
comprehension of narratives. By contrast, in Experiment 2, the
absence of story context would make “consistent” and “inconsistent” emotional sentences equivalent.
There is another potential effect that is independent of the story
context: the sentence-based semantic anomaly usually associated
with the classical N400 component. We expected that this effect
would be similar in both experiments, because it is a local consistency effect, independent of the presence or absence of discourse.
1
We thank Bruce Bartholow for kindly providing us with specific
details of the experimental design and procedures.
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LEÓN, DÍAZ, DE VEGA, AND HERNÁNDEZ
Experiment 1: Sentences in Discourse
Method
Participants. Twenty-three right-handed, neurologically
healthy students of Psychology at the University of La Laguna
participated in the experiment voluntarily, receiving academic
credits for their participation. All were native speakers of Spanish.
Materials. Twenty stories were written, each describing a
protagonist involved in events with an emotional tone. The stories,
half describing pleasant and half describing unpleasant episodes,
were inspired by previous materials that had proved an association
with emotional inferences in reading (de Vega et al., 1996). The
average length of the stories was 86 words (maximum ! 92 and
minimum ! 76). Each story was followed by 10 critical sentences
of six words each, the features of which will be described below.
Examples of the original Spanish stories and their translation into
English are given in the Appendix. The critical emotional words
were approximately controlled for length (consistent M ! 4.0
syllables; inconsistent M ! 3.9 syllables), and frequency (consistent M ! 38/million; inconsistent M ! 39/million).2
Design and procedure. Four types of critical sentence (emotionally consistent, emotionally inconsistent, semantically anomalous, and neutral) were manipulated at the within-participant level.
Participants were given as much time as they wanted to read each
story on the computer screen. During this reading period, no ERPs
were collected. Then two continuation sentences were displayed,
followed by the eight critical sentences presented randomly, two
for each experimental condition. The total number of sentences for
each experimental condition was 40. The emotional valence of the
consistent and inconsistent sentences was balanced: there were 20
positive consistent, 20 negative consistent, 20 positive inconsistent, and 20 negative inconsistent sentences. Both the continuation
and the critical sentences were presented automatically one word
at a time, in the center of the screen, using the following temporal
pattern: fixation point in the middle of the screen (200 ms), blank
(500 ms), five words presented sequentially in the middle of the
screen (each word: 400 ms " 200 ms blank), last word (600 ms),
blank (400 ms), message: BLINK (2000 ms), blank (800 ms). The
ERP recording was time-locked to the last word of each sentence.
The role of the continuation sentences was merely to link the story
content and the critical sentences, and they were not analyzed in
the study.
Participants were instructed to read the story and the critical
sentences for comprehension, “trying to imagine the situation and
how the protagonist would feel.” They also were informed that
they would be given a memory test at the end of the experiment.
The memory test was used merely to check that participants had
followed the comprehension instructions, and its results were not
subjected to statistical analysis.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) data collection, reduction,
and analysis. Participants were seated in a comfortable reclining
chair and instructed to focus their gaze on the center of the monitor,
avoiding any body movement, and paying attention to all stimuli
presented. Participants’ EEGs were recorded on a MEDICID 5 system (Neuronic SA, Havana), from 15 thin electrodes mounted on an
electrode elastic cap according to the 10% standard system of the
American Electroencephalographic Society. The recording sites
were placed on F7, Fz, F8, T1, T2, T3, T4, C5, Cz, C6, CP5, CP6,
Pz, O1, and O2. All EEG electrodes were referred to linked
mastoids; their impedance was kept below 5K#. The bio-signals
were recorded in the 0.05–50 Hz band and were digitized continuously with a sampling rate of 200 Hz. Two EOG electrodes, one
in suborbital position on the left eye and another on the external
canthus of the right eye, monitored vertical and horizontal eye
movements and blinks.
The ERP recording was time-locked to the last word of each
experimental sentence in the original Spanish version (underlined
in the Appendix). Epochs beginning 100 ms prior to stimulus onset
and continuing for 850 ms were created. Each EEG segment was
visually inspected and those contaminated by EOG artifacts were
manually eliminated off-line. Two subjects in Experiment 1 and
three in Experiment 2 were discarded because of their very noisy
EEGs. Following artifact rejection and EOG correction procedures, individual participant averages were computed for each
stimulus type.
The choice of ERP windows for statistical analysis was made as
follows: the raw ERP data were submitted to point-to-point comparisons among conditions, following Lage, Martı́nez, Hernández,
& Galán (in press). Windows that involved significant comparisons for at least 75 consecutive ms and that were consistent with
temporal windows reported in the literature were selected for
study. Four temporal windows fit these criteria in statistical contrasts: 75–150 ms, 200 –300 ms, 350 – 450 ms, and 600 – 800 ms.
The mean amplitude score in each temporal window was used as
the dependent variable in two sets of repeated measures analyses
of variance (ANOVA), including the four types of critical sentence
used as within-group factors. In half of the analyses, three regions
of interest, with three electrodes each, were included as a fixed
within-group factor. The three regions were: frontal (F7, Fz, F8),
central (C5, Cz, C6), and parietal (Pc5, Pz, Pc6). In the remaining
analyses, in order to explore hemispheric differences, the central
electrodes were suppressed and two lateral regions were selected:
(F7, C5, Pc5) and (F8, C6, Pc6).
Results
The results for each of the selected windows are reported,
focusing on Consistency effects. Figure 1 shows the ERP grand
average for emotionally consistent, emotionally inconsistent, semantically anomalous, and neutral sentences at frontal, central, and
parietal sites. Consistency effects reached statistical significance at
the 70 –150 ms, the 200 –300 ms, and the 350 – 450 ms temporal
windows, as described below.
Window 70 –150 ms. At this early window, there was a significant main effect of consistency, F(3, 66) ! 3.02, MSE !
209.68, p $ .05. Post hoc comparisons between pairs of conditions
revealed that emotionally inconsistent sentences elicited a more
negative wave than emotionally consistent sentences, t(22) ! 2.63,
p $ .015. Namely, at this early time window, Consistency effects
were entirely caused by emotional sentences that were inconsistent
with their story context.
Window 200 –300 ms. The only significant effects here were
obtained in the separate analysis including Hemisphere. Specifically,
2
The frequencies for the Spanish words were obtained from the Alameda and Cuetos dictionary (1995).
DISCOURSE-BASED EMOTIONAL CONSISTENCY
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Figure 1. Experiment 1: Event-related potentials (ERPs) for critical words at three regions (frontal: F7, Fz, F8;
central: C5, Cz, C6; and parietal: Pc5 Pz, Pc6) for emotionally consistent, emotionally inconsistent, neutral, and
semantically anomalous sentences, embedded in narrative contexts.
the Consistency % Hemisphere interaction was significant, F(3, 66) !
3.21, MSE ! 47.6, p $ .05. Post hoc pairwise comparisons showed
that there were only significant differences in the left hemisphere:
emotionally inconsistent sentences elicited a more negative deflection
than emotionally consistent sentences, t(22) ! 3.81, p $ .001 and
neutral sentences, t(22) ! 3.04, p $ .01, as can be seen comparing
left- and right-side electrodes in Figure 1.
Window 350 – 450 ms. A strong main effect of consistency
was found here, F(3, 66) ! 15.75; MSE ! 372.03, p $ .001,
although it was modulated by region, F(6, 132) ! 6.62, MSE !
98.74, p $ .001. Figure 1 shows that anomalous sentences elicited
a large negative wave that corresponds in shape, latency and
centro-parietal distribution to the typical N400 component. The
post hoc pairwise comparisons confirmed this impression. Anomalous sentences elicited larger negative waves than emotionally
consistent and neutral sentences at frontal, t(22) ! 2.74, p $ .01,
and t(22 ! 2.35, p $ .01, respectively), central, t(22) ! 6.86, p $
.001, and t(22 ! 4.58, p $ .001, respectively) and parietal sites,
t(22) ! 7.18, p $ .001, and t(22 ! 5.16, p $ .001, respectively).
Note that although the three pair comparisons reached the statistical level of significance, their magnitudes are not equivalent: the
differences are larger at the central and parietal sites.
Most importantly, emotionally inconsistent sentences also elicited
larger N400 waves than emotionally consistent sentences at central,
t(22) ! 3.50, p $ .01 and parietal sites, t(22) ! 4.08, p $ .001.
Emotionally inconsistent sentences also elicited a more negative wave
than neutral sentences at parietal sites, t(22) ! 2.76, p $ .01.
Discussion
The experiment obtained the standard N400 effect associated
with semantic anomaly. This provides a convenient replication of
a well-known effect that contributes to validating the present
study. Most importantly, discourse-level effects of emotional sentences were also obtained at three different time windows. First,
inconsistent emotions elicited larger centro-parietal N400 than
consistent emotions and neutral sentences, and were only smaller
than the N400 for anomalous sentences. These effects, however,
unlike the N400 for semantically anomalous words, cannot be
attributed to word mismatch at the sentence level. The emotional
words, whether consistent or inconsistent, are appropriate to the
local context of their respective sentences. Therefore, this emotional N400 seems to be related to discourse-level consistency,
although this intuition will be empirically tested in the next experiment.
Furthermore, some very early ERP components were also found
to be sensitive to emotional consistency. Thus, centro-parietal
early negativity (75–150 ms), followed by a reduced positivity in
the left hemisphere (200 –300 ms), were exclusively observed for
inconsistent emotions as compared to consistent emotions and
neutral sentences. Similar early effects of emotional visually presented words have been reported in the literature. For instance, P1
and N1 are modulated by emotional words (Bernat et al., 2001;
Kissler et al., 2007; Ortigue et al., 2004), suggesting that very rapid
processing of valenced words can take place even under subliminal
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LEÓN, DÍAZ, DE VEGA, AND HERNÁNDEZ
presentation and before lexical access is complete. In addition, the
early posterior negativity (EPN) for emotional words reported
elsewhere also suggests that the rapid processing of emotional
stimuli could take place (see Herbert et al., 2006, for a discussion).
However, the current N100 and P200 are not entirely comparable
to the early effects reported in other experiments, as they employed
word recognition tasks, whereas the current experiment employed
a discourse-level integration task, as will be discussed in the
general discussion.
In the current experiment, the critical emotional words were
approximately controlled for length. However, other lexical factors, as well as the possibility of subtle differences in the sentence
structure and wording between conditions, could be confused with
the discourse-level consistency effects. The next experiment employed the same critical sentences in isolation, by suppressing the
story context. This meant that emotional consistency was no longer
present, and as a result all emotional sentences should be equivalent. Consequently, the N400 and the earlier effects of emotional
consistency should completely disappear. We predicted, however,
that the N400 effects would still be associated with the semantically anomalous sentences, because their semantic anomaly occurs
at the local level of the sentence. Furthermore, the emotional
valence effects would be confirmed, because of their strong lexical
component, although the possibility exists that the lack of narrative
context would diminish or suppress such effects.
effect was significant, F(3, 57) ! 19.07, MSE ! 280.58, p $ .01,
although it was modulated by Region, F(6, 114) ! 2.5, MSE !
69.48, p $ .05. Anomalous sentences elicited a more negative
wave than emotionally consistent sentences, frontal: t(19) ! 3.71,
central: t(19) ! 5.14, and parietal: t(19) ! 5.30; p $ .01 in all
cases; anomalous sentences were also more negative than emotionally inconsistent sentences, frontal: t(19) ! 5.41, central:
t(19) ! 4.79, parietal: t(19) ! 4.37; p $ .01 in all cases; and
finally, anomalous sentences were more negative than neutral
sentences, frontal: t(19) ! 4.26, central: t(19) ! 6.32, and parietal:
t(19) ! 6.43; p $ .01 in all cases.
In contrast with the previous experiment, the emotionally inconsistent sentences did not differ significantly from emotionally
consistent or neutral sentences at any region (t $ 1 in all cases), as
can be seen in Figure 3, which shows the middle line electrodes in
both experiments.
Discussion
The absence of a narrative context completely suppressed the
emotional consistency effects, whereas the ordinary N400 effect
associated with anomalous sentences remained intact. In other
words, the extensive emotional consistency effects reported in the
previous experiment were genuine discourse-level phenomena associated with the emotional content of stories, rather than the local
features of words or sentences.
Experiment 2: Sentences in Isolation
General Discussion
Methods
Participants. Twenty-three right-handed, neurologically
healthy students of Psychology at the University of La Laguna
participated in the experiment voluntarily, receiving academic
credits for their participation. All were native speakers of Spanish.
Materials, design, and procedure. The 20 story contexts
were suppressed in this experiment, and only the experimental
sentences were presented (200 sentences in total, including the
“continuation” sentences). The sentences were slightly modified,
with a different character name used for each to avoid coreference.
This was done to discourage readers from constructing a plot with
the sentences. For instance, the sentences “John greeted the public
by raising his arms,” “Today Arthur felt totally fulfilled,” and
“Peter believed he was an envious writer” substituted “Hector
greeted the public raising his arms,” “Today Hector felt totally
fulfilled,” and “Hector believed he was an envious writer.”
The sentences were presented using the same procedure as in the
previous experiment, and the ERP was again time-locked to the
last word of each sentence. The EEG data collection, data reduction, and analyses followed the same procedures as in the previous
experiment.
Results
The method described above (Lage et al., in press) was applied
to analyze the raw ERP data. Only the 350 – 450 ms window met
the aforementioned selection criteria in this case. Figure 2 shows
a strong N400 with a centro-parietal distribution, exclusively associated with the anomalous sentences. Statistical analyses confirm this impression: At this time window, the Consistency main
The present study explores the neural bases of emotional language processing with written materials by means of ERP. The
study departs in several respects from other ERP studies in the
field of language and emotions. First, whereas most ERP studies
focus on words in purely lexical contexts, this research aims to
explore the processing of emotional words embedded in sentences
following a narrative. Second, many studies demand that participants carry out an explicit evaluative task, such as categorizing
words as pleasant or unpleasant, or judging them as old/new in a
recognition task. By contrast, the present study relies on a simple
language comprehension task that does not require any explicit
emotional evaluation of the materials.
The present study demonstrated discourse-level processing of
emotional narratives, which cannot be reduced to lexical or
sentence-level effects. Specifically, the ERPs showed emotional
consistency effects exclusively associated with the story context.
Thus, emotional sentences inconsistent with the events described
in the story produced a modulation of early and middle ERP
components as compared to emotionally consistent or neutral
sentences. Let us focus first on the consistency-related N400, that
is, the larger negative wave associated with inconsistent rather than
consistent sentences in central and posterior sites. According to the
literature, the N400 is an ordinary component in word processing
modulated by a number of lexical factors (e.g., word frequency and
concreteness) and, most importantly, modulated by sentence-level
and discourse-level semantic violations. The original work by
Marta Kutas and her colleagues (e.g., Kutas & Hillyard, 1984)
showed larger N400 for unexpected words in sentence contexts.
This sentence-level effect was replicated in our experiments when
semantically anomalous sentences were contrasted with consistent
DISCOURSE-BASED EMOTIONAL CONSISTENCY
869
Figure 2. Experiment 2: Event-related potentials (ERPs) for critical words at three regions (frontal: F7, Fz, F8;
central: C5, Cz, C6; and parietal: Pc5, Pz, Pc6) for emotionally consistent, emotionally inconsistent, neutral, and
semantically anomalous sentences, presented without narrative context.
sentences. What is more important for the present study is the fact
that a smaller but significant N400 effect was also obtained when
emotionally consistent and inconsistent sentences were compared.
This effect was a discourse-level rather than a local sentence-level
effect, because the emotionally inconsistent sentences were perfectly correct in their own right, and the semantic violation only
occurred in the context of the stories (Experiment 1). This was
evident, because when the same sentences were presented in
isolation, without a story context, in Experiment 2, no consistency
effect was observed. This contrasts with the ordinary N400 associated with locally anomalous words, obtained both with and
without story context.
Was the discourse-level N400 found here a specific signature of
emotional coherence violations, or was it a general consequence of
discourse-level semantic violation? Most likely it was the latter.
The modulation of N400 by discourse-level variables has been
previously reported with nonemotional content (Federmeier &
Kutas, 1999; Nieuwland & van Berkum, 2006; St. George, Mannes
& Hoffman, 1994, 1997; van Berkum et al., 1999, 2003), thus the
current N400 does not seem to be a content-specific effect of
emotional narratives. In spite of this, the consistency modulation
of the N400 in the present research is very informative about how
people comprehend emotional narratives under simple comprehension demands. It clearly shows that readers routinely track the
protagonist’s emotions while reading stories and are immediately
sensitive to sentences that conflict with the expected emotions.
In this article, early ERP components (N100 extending to P200)
were also associated with discourse-level consistency. Let us comment first on the modulation of N100 by emotional consistency.
This effect is intriguing, because most researchers consider that
lexical processes are not yet complete at such an early stage; the
semantic processing of words does not take place until only about
200 ms (e.g., P200, or EPN component) after the word onset (e.g.,
Ortigue et al., 2004; Pulvermüller, 2001). Some papers, however,
reported similar early modulation of P100 and N100 by emotional
words (Bernat et al., 2001; Ortigue et al., 2004). One possible
explanation for these facts is that emotional words could have a
special lexical status, with their emotional valence being evaluated
prelexically or in parallel to lexical processes. However, most
studies with emotional words found later modulations (in the P200,
EPN, N400 and LPP components), which are more compatible
with lexical or postlexical stages (e.g., Carretié et al., 2008; Kanske & Kotz, 2007; Kissler et al., 2007).
The above studies on early modulation of ERPs by emotional
words and their conflicting results and interpretations cannot be
directly extended to the discourse-level consistency effects found
in the present study, most obviously because in this study emotional words were embedded in sentences and texts involving a
comprehension task, rather than being presented as isolated words
in a word recognition task. This means that the N100/P200 in this
study must be entirely different phenomena than the early ERP
components reported elsewhere. The N100 here, for instance,
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LEÓN, DÍAZ, DE VEGA, AND HERNÁNDEZ
Figure 3. ERPs for the critical words at the midline electrodes (Fz, Cz, Pz) for emotionally consistent,
emotionally inconsistent, neutral, and semantically anomalous sentences, following a narrative context (Exp. 1)
and without narrative context (Exp. 2).
seems to be independent of the particular lexical features of the
emotional word, including its emotional valence, as it was modulated by consistency in the story context (Experiment 1) and
completely disappeared when the story context was absent (Experiment 2). The consistency modulation of the N100 extended to
the next window of 200 –300 ms, grossly corresponding to the
P200 component. Specifically, emotionally consistent sentences
were more positive than emotionally inconsistent sentences in the
left hemisphere. Again, this was a discourse-level effect, because
it completely disappeared when the story context was removed. In
addition, the effect was exclusive of emotional content, because
anomalous sentences did not elicit any differential P200.
Some recent studies have shown similar discourse-level effects
on early components of the ERP signal, when the previous context
creates strong semantic expectations. For instance, van Berkum,
Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, and Hagoort (2005) asked participants to listen to stories originally written in Dutch, such as: “The
burglar had no trouble locating the secret family safe. Of course it
was situated behind a big . . .” The critical manipulation was the
Dutch syntactic gender of the adjective (big) that matched or
mismatched the gender of the expected upcoming word ( painting).
The most remarkable effect was that gender-mismatching adjectives elicited a significantly larger positivity relative to gendermatching adjectives between 50 and 250 ms after their onset,
clearly demonstrating a very early discourse-level anticipation of
the inferred word. The N100 in this study differs in polarity from
the early positivity found by van Berkum et al. (2005). This could
be a consequence of the many differences between the two exper-
iments (stimuli modality, presence of syntactic violations, emotionality of materials, etc.). But a possibility, deserving further
research, is that the N100 in this study could be a specific signature
for violations of emotional expectations, whereas the early positivity found by van Berkum et al. (2005) corresponds to violations
of semantic expectations. In any case, these early components are
both discourse-based phenomena, not to be observed in isolated
words. Thus, in our Experiment 1, when participants read a given
story, they process a number of events with an emotional significance for the story’s protagonist. This creates a strong expectation
toward the consistent emotional word, and when an inconsistent
word is provided, the semantic violation is immediately detected,
eliciting the early ERP deflection. The anticipatory character of
emotional inferences has been also reported in the literature on
reading comprehension. Thus, threatening stories trigger anticipatory inferences, especially in individuals with high-trait anxiety
(e.g., Calvo, 2001; Calvo, Meseguer, & Carreiras, 2001).
As mentioned in the introduction, LPPs are frequently reported
for emotional words. In addition, the aforementioned study by
Bartholow et al. (2001) also obtained LPP for expectation violations in the context of stories, interpreted as an index of semantic
elaboration. However, our Experiment 1, in spite of using a paradigm similar to that of Bartholow et al., did not find any LPP. On
the contrary, in Experiment 1, we found very early ERP components sensitive to consistency. The kind of inferences involved in
both studies could explain the different temporal course in the ERP
waves. In Bartholow et al.’s study, the stories attempted to induce
behavioral expectations about the protagonist (e.g., “She always
DISCOURSE-BASED EMOTIONAL CONSISTENCY
opens the door for strangers”), and the critical sentences described
the protagonist behaving consistently or inconsistently with that
expectation. By contrast, stories in our Experiment 1 described
situations with implicit emotional value, and the critical sentences
explicitly mentioned an emotion either consistent or inconsistent
with the story. The early components found in the current study
suggest a very rapid establishment of emotional expectations,
whereas the late components found by Bartholow et al. suggest a
slower establishment of behavioral expectations.
On the other hand, we may note that most discourse-level
studies involving expectation violations do not report LPP. Instead, they usually obtain a strong modulation by consistency of
N400 and sometimes very early components as well, quite similar
to the present study (e.g., Coulson & Kutas, 2001; Nieuwland &
van Berkum, 2006; van Berkum et al., 2005, 1999, 2003).
The emotional consistency effects on several ERP components
found here are complementary to data in behavioral and neuroimaging studies showing that readers actively use emotional features
to establish the coherence of narratives. For instance, in a review
of the literature on inferences in narrative comprehension,
Graesser, Singer, and Trabasso (1994) showed that emotional
inferences are more likely to occur than spatial, temporal or causal
inferences. For their part, Ferstl, Rinck, & von Cramon, (2005)
using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), reported that
emotional narratives activate brain areas typically associated with
emotional processes, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
and the amygdala. This emotional circuitry activation occurred
even though their participants, like ours, were engaged in a simple
nonevaluative comprehension task.
In sum, the present research showed how brain activity, measured by means of ERP, is sensitive to the emotional dimension of
discourse comprehension. The study demonstrated that beyond
lexical factors (e.g., word valence), readers evaluate how well a
given emotional sentence matches the previous narrative context.
Emotional sentences producing a discourse-level violation elicit a
very early automatic ERP response (N100/P200), followed by a
later discourse-level N400. This early ERP sensitivity to discourselevel emotional consistency contrasts with the absence of later
components such as LPP, usually associated with later elaboration
or semantic repair attempts. It seems that in the emotional processing of stories, a “fast track” is used to create strong lexical
expectations, but there is no evidence here that later elaboration for
inconsistent emotions takes place. The observed effects are not
surprising, because they are in line with our intuition regarding
emotional engagement during the comprehension of narratives.
Further studies will be necessary to examine other important
aspects of the buildup of discourse-based emotional expectations.
Thus, this study is not conclusive about whether discourse-based
emotional expectations involve emotional representations with a
special status differing from that of other semantic expectations
(e.g., visual-spatial, causal, temporal, etc.). Another possible avenue of research would be how ERP data are sensitive to the
updating of the protagonist’s emotions as readers understand successive situations with different emotional meaning.
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Appendix
Examples of the Original Spanish Materials and Their Translation Into English. A Story
of Positive Valence, and a Story of Negative Valence, Followed Each by the 10 Critical
Sentences Are Included
Example 1 (Positive Valence)
Neutral Sentences
Story Context
Héctor llevaba una pipa entre dientes.
El estreno de la obra de Héctor.
Héctor es un joven escritor, que tras muchos sacrificios y
esfuerzos iba a estrenar su primera obra de teatro. Héctor asistió
entre bastidores a la representación y les dio ánimos a las actrices
y actores. Al final de la obra el público aplaudió calurosamente
durante varios minutos. El director de la obra le pidió al propio
Héctor que saliese al escenario a saludar y el público le ovacionó
cariñosamente. Al dı́a siguiente todos los crı́ticos reconocı́an en
Héctor un Gran Talento Teatral.
(The premiere of Hector’s play.)
(Hector is a young writer, who after hard work and motivation,
was going to premiere his first theatre play. Hector was attending
the play offstage, encouraging the actors and actresses. After the
performance, the audience applauded enthusiastically for several
minutes. The director of the play asked Hector to go out on stage,
and the public gave him an ovation. The next day, many critics
wrote that Hector was a new theatre talent.)
(Hector held a pipe between his teeth.)
Continuation Sentences
Héctor miraba a los espectadores sonriendo.
(Hector looked at the public with a smile.)
Héctor se dirigió a un taxi.
(Hector went out to get a taxi.)
Emotionally Consistent Sentences
Héctor hoy se sentı́a totalmente realizado.
(Today Hector felt totally fulfilled.)
Héctor se consideraba un autor triunfante.
(Hector believed he was a successful writer.)
Emotionally Inconsistent Sentences
Héctor hoy se sentı́a enteramente fracasado.
(Today Hector felt like a complete failure.)
Héctor se consideraba un autor envidioso.
(Hector believed he was an envious writer.)
Semantically Anomalous Sentences
Héctor levantaba en alto sus brazos.
Héctor empezó a firmar varios grillos.
(Hector raised his arms.)
(Hector started to sign several crickets.)
873
DISCOURSE-BASED EMOTIONAL CONSISTENCY
Héctor querı́a cenar en un armario.
(Hector wanted to have dinner in the closet.)
Example 2 (Negative Valence)
Story Context
Carlos lejos de casa.
A Carlos le habrı́a gustado que a aquel viaje de trabajo hubieran venido su mujer y sus hijos. Y más en aquel paı́s lejano. A los
tres dı́as de estar allı́ se enteró de que habı́a habido una tremenda
inundación en su ciudad. Carlos llamó inmediatamente a su familia y amigos pero la lı́nea estaba rota. En la embajada de su
paı́s no tenı́an ningún dato útil. Llamó al aeropuerto para salir en
el primer avión, pero no habı́a ningún vuelo hasta el dı́a siguiente.
La televisión no daba más noticias.
(Carlos is away from home.)
(Carlos would have liked that his wife and children to come with
him on that business trip to a faraway country. Three days later, he
learned that there had been a great flood in his town. Carlos
immediately tried to call his family and friends, but the phones did
not work. The Embassy of his country did not have any news,
either. He called the airport to get the next plane, but there were no
flights until the next day. The TV news was very confused on the
event.)
Neutral Sentences
Carlos empezó a preparar la maleta.
(Carlos started to prepare his bags.)
Carlos pidió que le sirvieran café.
(Carlos ordered a cup of coffee.)
Emotionally Consistent Sentences
Carlos se sentı́a por momentos desesperado.
(Carlos was feeling more and more desperate.)
Carlos estaba sintiéndose realmente muy angustiado.
(Carlos was feeling real anguish.)
Emotionally Inconsistent Sentences
Carlos se sentı́a realmente muy tranquilo.
(Carlos was feeling really calm.)
Carlos se sentı́a por momentos halagado.
(Carlos was feeling more and more flattered.)
Semantically Anomalous Sentences
Carlos sacó la agenda del veneno.
(Carlos took out his diary of poison.)
Continuation Sentences
Carlos notaba opresión en el pecho.
(Carlos noticed a pressure in his chest.)
Carlos pasó la noche de insomnio.
(Carlos was insomniac all night.)
Carlos se afeitó con una papelera.
(Carlos shaved with the wastebasket.)
Received November 21, 2008
Revision received February 25, 2010
Accepted April 14, 2010 !