Independent effects of word concreteness and word valence on immediate serial recall.

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study-test trials with 7-item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments 1 and 2) and neutral (i.e. non-emotion) words with either high or low concreteness (Experiment 2). In serial recall performance, we replicated the typical item concreteness effect (concrete words are better recalled than abstract words) and obtained an item valence effect (positive/neutral words are better recalled than negative words). However, there was no concreteness × valence interaction. We conclude that both word valence and word concreteness independently contribute to the serial order retention of emotion words in the immediate serial recall task.

Multiple producible cues do not aid face-name memory: A reverse production effect.

Are there effective mechanisms that can be used to remember someone's name? The production effect is a phenomenon that exemplifies memory's robust benefit for studied words or phrases that have been spoken out loud, as opposed to only hearing or seeing them. However, this robust effect has not yet been identified for face-name pairings. The present study seeks to examine the boundary conditions of the production effect in face-name pairings by incorporating the additional cue of valenced adjectives. Participants were presented with facial images and a sentence stating the name and a description of the individual. Sentences were learned in one of four ways: saying the sentence out loud, reading it silently, reading it while hearing it, or only listening to the sentence presented while viewing the face. Memory for the face, name, and adjective combinations were tested using various types of cues: face only (Experiment 1a), or face and name or adjective (Experiment 1b & Experiment 2). Results replicate the lack of a production effect for face-name memory, and instead support a reverse effect for such stimuli. These findings indicate the unique processing of faces and highlight boundary conditions of the production effect.

Divergent Thinking in Survival Processing: Did Our Ancestors Benefit From Creative Thinking?

The survival processing advantage is a robust mnemonic device in which information processed for its relevance to one's survival is subsequently better remembered. Research indicates that elaborative processing may be a key component underlying this memory effect, and that this mechanism resembles divergent thinking, whereby words with a greater number of creative uses in a given scenario are better remembered. If this particular function underpins adaptive memory, then individual differences in creativity may play a part in the degree to which people benefit from this advantage. We expected that highly creative individuals who engage more in divergent thinking would not necessarily benefit to a greater degree than less creative individuals, due to potential redundant processing. In this between-subjects experiment, participants rated words according to their relevance to the typical grasslands survival scenario or according to their pleasantness (a control common to the survival paradigm and known to enhance memory). While we did find a main effect of both condition (survival v. pleasantness) and creativity (high v. low), there was no interaction. This set of findings suggests that creative individuals may not benefit to a greater degree in survival processing, despite their ability to think divergently.

Paired-associate learning, animacy, and imageability effects in the survival advantage.

The current study examined animacy and paired-associate learning through a survival-processing paradigm (Nairne et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(2), 263-273, 2007; Schwartz & Brothers, 2014). English-speaking monolingual participants were asked to learn a set of new word translations to improve their chances of survival or to improve their study abroad experience. Animate and inanimate words were included in this task, to further examine animacy effects in cued recall paradigms (Popp & Serra in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 186-201, 2016; VanArsdall et al. in Experimental Psychology, 60(3), 172-178, 2013). Across sentence-completion, matching, and picture-naming tasks, learning was facilitated by the survival context, relative to the study abroad context and an intentional learning condition. Scenario ratings indicated this survival advantage could also be a function of higher imageability ratings for the survival context than for the study abroad context. Replicating previous findings with cued recall, inanimate words were overall better remembered than animate words, across all three tasks, though survival processing facilitated language-learning for both animate and inanimate categories. This 'reverse animacy effect' replicated previous findings by Popp and Serra (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 186-201, 2016), showing animate words can interfere with a participant's ability to create associations with their words, including those in a new language. These results are discussed with regards to the widely-reliable survival and animacy advantages, with a particular emphasis on the role of imageability in this paradigm.

How do Emotion Word Type and Valence Influence Language Processing? The Case of Arabic-English Bilinguals.

The current study examines the influence of word type (i.e., emotion-label vs. emotion-laden) and valence (i.e., positive vs. negative vs. neutral) on the processing of emotion words among bilinguals. To this end, three groups of Arabic-English bilinguals (n = 120 per group) completed the tasks of free recall, ratings for concreteness, imageability and context availability, and discrete word association. Two groups, representing different levels of second language (L2) exposure completed the tasks in English while the third group completed the tasks in Arabic. The results of the free recall and rating tasks generally supported the influence of word type, valence and L2 exposure on the processing of emotional content; namely, emotion-label vs. emotion-laden vs. neutral words and negative vs. positive emotion words generally behaved significantly differently, and the participants with increased L2 exposure usually outperformed the ones with less exposure. In contrast, the word association task often failed to present statistically significant findings. The results are interpreted in line with the specific nature of the Arabic mental lexicon, the existing literature, and relevant theoretical models of emotion and the bilingual mental lexicon. Directions for future research are proposed.

The time course of processing emotion-laden words during sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements.

While recent research has explored the effect that positive and negative emotion words (e.g., happy or sad) have on the eye-movement record during reading, the current study examined the effect of positive and negative emotion-laden words (e.g., birthday or funeral) on eye movements. Emotion-laden words do not express a state of mind but have emotional associations and connotations. The current results indicated that both positive and negative emotion-laden words have a processing advantage over neutral words, although the relative time-course of processing differs between words of positive and negative valence. Specifically, positive emotion-laden words showed advantages in early, late, and post-target measures, while negative emotion-laden words showed effects only in late and post-target measures.

The Distinctiveness of Emotion Words: Does It Hold for Foreign Language Learners? The Case of Arab EFL Learners.

Empirical evidence has recently been provided for the distinctiveness of emotion words as compared to abstract and concrete words for monolinguals, calling for a reconsideration of the relation between emotion and language. The present study investigates whether the distinctiveness of emotion words among monolinguals holds for foreign language learners. To this end, three groups (n = 120 per group) of late Arabic-English bilinguals who learned English as a foreign language completed tasks including free recall, rating, and discrete word association. One group completed the tasks in Arabic while the other two groups, representing two levels of foreign language exposure, completed the tasks in English. Planned comparisons indicated the distinctiveness of emotion words in the participants' first and foreign languages in the free recall and rating tasks while no significant differences were found in the word association task. The results are discussed in light of the existing literature and relevant theoretical models.

Effects of Valence on Hemispheric Specialization for Emotion Word Processing.

The use of emotion in language is a key element of human interactions and a rich area for cognitive research. The present study examined reactions to words of five types: positive emotion (e.g., happiness), negative emotion (e.g., hatred), positive emotion-laden (e.g., blessing), negative emotion-laden (e.g., prison), and neutral (e.g., chance). Words and nonwords were intermixed in a lexical decision task using hemifield presentation. Results revealed a general left hemisphere advantage. Overall, reaction times for positive words were faster than for negative or neutral words and this effect varied by hemifield of presentation. These results support a valence hypothesis of specialized processing in the left hemisphere of the brain for positive emotions and the right hemisphere for negative emotions.

Finding the positive in all of the negative: Facilitation for color-related emotion words in a negative priming paradigm.

A study conducted by Sutton and Altarriba (2008) suggested that color-related emotion words (e.g., sad, envy) produce standard Stroop interference effects. Associations between emotion words and colors are culture specific, and may be the result of common phrases in a language (e.g., "feeling blue" in English), or a result of the manner in which color is used to signify information or meaning in a language (e.g., red often represents threat). In the present paper, the same stimuli were investigated in a negative priming paradigm in which participants were asked to name the ink color of a presented word. In this task, response times are typically slower in ignored repetition trials (i.e., the probe target is related to the prime distractor) than control trials. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that color words and color-related neutral words yielded negative priming; however, color-related emotion words yielded significant facilitation. In Experiment 2, the three word types were intermixed within the same block and the same results were obtained. The current study provides converging evidence that salient distractors cannot be ignored.

Multiple Translations in Bilingual Memory: Processing Differences Across Concrete, Abstract, and Emotion Words.

Historically, the manner in which translation ambiguity and emotional content are represented in bilingual memory have often been ignored in many theoretical and empirical investigations, resulting in these linguistic factors related to bilingualism being absent from even the most promising models of bilingual memory representation. However, in recent years it was reported that the number of translations a word has across languages influences the speed with which bilinguals translate concrete and abstract words from one language into another (Tokowicz and Kroll in Lang Cogn Process 22:727-779, 2007). The current work examines how the number of translations that characterize a word influences bilingual lexical organization and the processing of concrete, abstract, and emotional stimuli. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals translated concrete and abstract words with one and more than one translation. As reported by Tokowicz and Kroll, concreteness effects emerged only when words had more than one translation across languages. In Experiment 2, bilinguals translated emotion words with more than one translation. Concreteness effects emerged in both language directions for words with more than one translation, and in the L1-L2 language direction for words with a single translation across languages. These findings are discussed in terms of how multiple translations, specifically for emotion words, might be incorporated into current models of bilingual memory representation.

Emotion Word Processing: Effects of Word Type and Valence in Spanish-English Bilinguals.

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in Int J Billing 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in Am J Psychol, in press), and rapid serial visual processing (Knickerbocker and Altarriba in Vis Cogn 21(5):599-627, 2013). Each of these studies has found significant differences in emotion and emotion-laden word processing. The current study investigated this word type distinction using a bilingual sample, to assess emotion and emotion-laden word processing in a bilingual's two languages. Sixty Spanish-English bilinguals performed a masked LDT with positive and negative emotion and emotion-laden word pairs, in either Spanish or English. Overall, the four-way interaction of relatedness, word type, valence, and language was significant. Response times (RTs) to emotion words were significantly faster than RTs to emotion-laden words, but only in English. These results indicate that the emotion/emotion-laden word type distinction may be the most robust in a person's dominant language.

Color associations to emotion and emotion-laden words: A collection of norms for stimulus construction and selection.

Color has the ability to influence a variety of human behaviors, such as object recognition, the identification of facial expressions, and the ability to categorize stimuli as positive or negative. Researchers have started to examine the relationship between emotional words and colors, and the findings have revealed that brightness is often associated with positive emotional words and darkness with negative emotional words (e.g., Meier, Robinson, & Clore, Psychological Science, 15, 82-87, 2004). In addition, words such as anger and failure seem to be inherently associated with the color red (e.g., Kuhbandner & Pekrun). The purpose of the present study was to construct norms for positive and negative emotion and emotion-laden words and their color associations. Participants were asked to provide the first color that came to mind for a set of 160 emotional items. The results revealed that the color RED was most commonly associated with negative emotion and emotion-laden words, whereas YELLOW and WHITE were associated with positive emotion and emotion-laden words, respectively. The present work provides researchers with a large database to aid in stimulus construction and selection.

Emotion Word Type and Affective Valence Priming at a Long Stimulus Onset Asynchrony.

As the division between emotion and emotion-laden words has been viewed as controversial by, for example, Kousta and colleagues, the current study attempted a replication and extension of findings previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In their findings, Kazanas and Altarriba reported significant differences in response times (RTs) and priming effects between emotion and emotion-laden words, with faster RTs and larger priming effects with emotion words than with emotion-laden words. These findings were consistent across unmasked (Experiment 1) and masked (Experiment 2) versions of a lexical decision task, where participants either explicitly or implicitly processed the prime words of each prime-target word pair. Findings from Experiment 2 have been previously replicated by Kazanas and Altarriba with a Spanish­English bilingual sample, when tested in English, the participants' functionally dominant language. The current study was designed to extend these previous findings, using a l000-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), which was longer than the 250-ms SOA originally used by Kazanas and Altarriba. Findings from the current study supported the division between emotion and emotion-laden words, as they replicated those previously described by Kazanas and Altarriba. In addition, the current study determined that negative words were processed significantly slower in this experiment, with a long SOA (replicating findings by Rossell and Nobre).

The Automatic Activation of Emotion and Emotion-Laden Words: Evidence from a Masked and Unmasked Priming Paradigm.

A primed lexical decision task (LDT) was used to determine whether emotion (e.g., love, fear) and emotion-laden (e.g., puppy, hospital) word processing differs, both explicitly and implicitly. Previous experiments have investigated how emotion word processing differs from both abstract and concrete word processing (Altarriba & Bauer, 2004; Altarriba, Bauer, & Benvenuto, 1999). To assess for differences between emotion and emotion-laden word processing, 2 experiments were conducted, the first assessing explicit processing (using an unmasked LDT) and the second assessing automatic processing (using a masked LDT). The prediction that semantic priming would differ between emotion word pairs and emotion-laden word pairs was confirmed in both experiments, with shorter response times for emotion targets and greater priming effects for emotion word pairs than for emotion-laden word pairs. The role of valence is discussed, emphasizing the ways valence affects the speed with which these words are accessed and processed.

Local and Global Task Switching Costs in Bilinguals Who Vary in Second Language Proficiency.

We examined the relationship between bilinguals' second language (L2) proficiency and their performance on a Stroop switching task, in which a color word (e.g., GREEN) appeared in a congruent ink color (e.g., green) or an incongruent ink color (e.g., red). Participants either read aloud the color word in the word-reading trials or named the ink color in the color-naming trials. Bilinguals who varied in L2 proficiency received 2 pure blocks, consisting of word-reading trials and color-naming trials, respectively, and 1 mixed block, consisting of intermixed word-reading and color-naming trials in an alternating-runs pattern. Comparing performance in nonswitch trials in the mixed block and the pure block provides a measure of global switch costs, whereas differences on switch trials and nonswitch trials in the mixed block reflect local switch costs. Bilinguals with higher L2 proficiency showed a marginally smaller Stroop effect in color naming, a smaller local switch cost in word reading (but not in color naming), and a smaller word-reading versus color-naming task set asymmetry in local switch costs. The latter result was consistent with the language switching finding that the L1/L2 switch cost asymmetry decreased as a function of bilinguals' L2 proficiency. Overall, the current findings support the facilitative role of L2 proficiency in bilinguals' task set switching: Those with higher L2 proficiency have better task set shifting and reconfiguration and updating abilities when they switch from a more difficult task set (color naming) to an easier task set (word reading) in a task-switching paradigm.

The survival advantage: Underlying mechanisms and extant limitations.

Recently, researchers have begun to investigate the function of memory in our evolutionary history. According to Nairne and colleagues (e.g., Nairne, Pandeirada, and Thompson, 2008; Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada, 2007), the best mnemonic strategy for learning lists of unrelated words may be one that addresses the same problems that our Pleistocene ancestors faced: fitness-relevant problems including securing food and water, as well as protecting themselves from predators. Survival processing has been shown to promote better recall and recognition memory than many well-known mnemonic strategies (e.g., pleasantness ratings, imagery, generation, etc.). However, the survival advantage does not extend to all types of stimuli and tasks. The current review presents research that has replicated Nairne et al.'s (2007) original findings, in addition to the research designs that fail to replicate the survival advantage. In other words, there are specific manipulations in which survival processing does not appear to benefit memory any more than other strategies. Potential mechanisms for the survival advantage are described, with an emphasis on those that are the most plausible. These proximate mechanisms outline the memory processes that may contribute to the advantage, although the ultimate mechanism may be the congruity between the survival scenario and Pleistocene problem-solving.

Mental juggling: when does multitasking impair reading comprehension?

The present study investigated the conditions under which multitasking impairs reading comprehension. Participants read prose passages (the primary task), some of which required them to perform a secondary task. In Experiment 1, we compared two different types of secondary tasks (answering trivia questions and solving math problems). Reading comprehension was assessed using a multiple-choice test that measured both factual and conceptual knowledge. The results showed no observable detrimental effects associated with multitasking. In Experiment 2, the secondary task was a cognitive load task that required participants to remember a string of numbers while reading the passages. Performance on the reading comprehension test was lower in the cognitive load conditions relative to the no-load condition. The present study delineates the conditions under which multitasking can impair or have no effect on reading comprehension. These results further our understanding of our capacity to multitask and have practical implications in our technologically advanced society in which multitasking has become commonplace.

Survival Processing and the Stroop Task : Does the Survival Advantage Depend on Deeper Processing During Encoding?

This study was designed to investigate the impact of survival processing with a novel task for this paradigm: the Stroop color-naming task. As the literature is mixed with regard to task generalizability, with survival processing promoting better memory for words, but not better memory for faces or paired associates, these types of task investigations are important to a growing field of research. Using the Stroop task provides a unique contribution, as identifying items by color is an important evolutionary adaptation and not specific to humans as is the case with word recall. Our results indicate that survival processing, with its accompanying survival-relevance rating task, remains the best mnemonic strategy for word memory. However, our results also indicate that presenting the survival passage does not motivate better color-naming performance than color-naming alone. In addition, survival processing led to a larger amount of Stroop interference, though not significantly larger than the other conditions. Together, these findings suggest that considering one's survival when performing memory and attention-based tasks does not enhance cognitive performance generally, although greater allocation of attentional resources to color-incongruent concrete objects could be considered adaptive. These findings support the notion that engaging in deeper processing via survival-relevance ratings may preserve these words across a variety of experimental manipulations.

Emotion effects during reading: Influence of an emotion target word on eye movements and processing.

Recently, Scott, O'Donnell and Sereno reported that words of high valence and arousal are processed with greater ease than neutral words during sentence reading. However, this study unsystematically intermixed emotion (label a state of mind, e.g., terrified or happy) and emotion-laden words (refer to a concept that is associated with an emotional state, e.g., debt or marriage). We compared the eye-movement record while participants read sentences that contained a neutral target word (e.g., chair) or an emotion word (no emotion-laden words were included). Readers were able to process both positive (e.g., happy) and negative emotion words (e.g., distressed) faster than neutral words. This was true across a wide range of early (e.g., first fixation durations) and late (e.g., total times on the post-target region) measures. Additional analyses revealed that State Trait Anxiety Inventory scores interacted with the emotion effect and that the emotion effect was not due to arousal alone.

The relationship between language proficiency and attentional control in Cantonese-English bilingual children: evidence from Simon, Simon switching, and working memory tasks.

By administering Simon, Simon switching, and operation-span working memory tasks to Cantonese-English bilingual children who varied in their first-language (L1, Cantonese) and second-language (L2, English) proficiencies, as quantified by standardized vocabulary test performance, the current study examined the effects of L1 and L2 proficiency on attentional control performance. Apart from mean performance, we conducted ex-Gaussian analyses to capture the modal and positive-tail components of participants' reaction time distributions in the Simon and Simon switching tasks. Bilinguals' L2 proficiency was associated with higher scores in the operation span task, and a shift of reaction time distributions in incongruent trials, relative to congruent trials (Simon effect in µ), and the tail size of reaction time distributions (τ) regardless of trial types in the Simon task. Bilinguals' L1 proficiency, which was strongly associated with participants' age, showed similar results, except that it was not associated with the Simon effect in µ. In contrast, neither bilinguals' L1 nor L2 proficiency modulated the global switch cost or local switch cost in the Simon switching task. After taking into account potential cognitive maturation by partialling out the participants' age, only (a) scores in the working memory task and (b) RT in incongruent trials and (c) Simon effect in µ in the Simon task could still be predicted by bilinguals' L2 proficiency. Overall, the current findings suggest that bilingual children's L2 proficiency was associated with their conflict resolution and working memory capacity, but not goal maintenance or task-set switching, when they performed the cognitive tasks that demanded attentional control. This was not entirely consistent with the findings of college-age bilinguals reported in previous studies.