Arousal and emotional valence interact in written word recognition

Behavioural and neurophysiological studies reveal a prioritisation for emotional material during different cognitive tasks. Although emotion comprises two dimensions, i.e., valence and arousal, previous research has mostly focused on the former. This study aimed to investigate the effects of valence and arousal on lexical decision (LD) by manipulating both dimensions, while controlling correlated psycholinguistic variables (e.g., word length, frequency, imageability). Results showed that valence and arousal affect word recognition in an interactive way: LD latencies are slower for positive high-arousal and negative low-arousal words compared to positive low-arousal and negative high-arousal words, in line with an approach-withdrawal tendency model. Furthermore, principal component and regression analyses revealed a unique contribution of a cluster of emotion variables, independent of lexico-semantic variables, to explaining LD latencies. We conclude that emotional valence and arousal both need to be taken into account in studies of word processing as they show an interactive relationship.