关键词: 语言标识, 情绪词, 主观情绪体验

Abstract: With the development of cognitive and emotional neuroscience, more and more researchers relise that there are mutual interactions between cognitive and emotional systems. Using behavioral and neuroimaging methods, lots of researchers have investigated the modulation effects of emotion on cognitive processing, such as perception, attention, memory and language processing etc. However, there are considerately less studies to examine the effects of cognitive processing, especially language processing, on emotional experience. Therefore, the present research aimed to examine the modulation effects of language (verbal labeling) on individual’s emotional experience through the behavioral method. Two experiments were conducted, and both presented emotional pictures (selected from International Affective Picture System) to the participants, who would self-report their experience about the pictures on likert 9-point scale (1 meant extremely negative and 9 meant extremely positive). Along with the emotional pictures, different verbal labels were put below the pictures, and participants were asked to pay attention to both pictures and verbal labels. In a typical trial, a red “+” fixation was presented 500 ms first, after that the target stimulus (picture and label) was presented 4000 ms and then a response cue appeared which means participants need to press a key (1-9) to express their experience. The inter-stimuli interval is 1000 ms. In order to make sure that participants watched the verbal labels, an old/new word recognition task was performed after the picture watching time. In the experiment 1, the modulation effects of verbal labeling on different emotional experience were investigated. Participants watched three types of pictures (negatice, positive and neutral) with two kinds of verbal labels (neutral Chinese verbal label and Korean characters). Results showed that participants reported significantly less negative experience when the negative pictures were paired with a verbal label other than Korean characters, however, no significant differences were found in neutral and positive pictures. These results suggested that verbal labelings have effects on the individual’s experience, and the access to word meaning is necessary to produce this effects since the unknown Korean word label cannot affect the experience. To explore whether the effects of word label are located in deeper semantic processing level, we manipulated the affective meaning of word label in experiment 2. Negative pictures were paired with negative, positive and neutral word label respectly. The results showed that the subjective experience of participants was significantly higher when negative pictures were paired with negative and positive word label other than neutral label. In other words, the affective meaning of word label have remarkable impact on individual’s experience. These results cooperate with our hypothesis that meaning access of word label is essential for labels to take effects. Taken together, we not only investigated the influence of verbal labeling to different types of experience, but also the influence of different verbal labeling to the same experience. Experiment 1 suggested the verbal labeling effects do exist, and verbal labeling could reduce negative emotion experience. Experiment 2 suggested that the labeling effects of different emotional words had significant differences and the positive or negative labelings were more helpful to reduce negative emotional experience. As advocated by Pessoa (2009), both emotion and cognition determine individual’s behavior, and there are intimate interactions between emotional and cognitive systems. The current studies explored the modulation effects of higher cognitive process (language processing) on individual’s affective experience, which produce relatively solid evidence for the relationship of emotional and cognitive system. However, it worth noticed that no significant label effects were found for positive pictures, and it still need further delicate research to explore the modulation mechanism of labelings on subjective experience.

Key words: verbal labeling, emotional words, subjective emotional experience