Modulation of ongoing cognitive processes by emotionally intense words LUIS CARRETIE ´ , a JOSE ´ A. HINOJOSA, b JACOBO ALBERT, a SARA LO ´ PEZ-MARTI ´ N, a BELE ´ N S. DE LA GA ´ NDARA, a JOSE ´ M. IGOA, a and MARI ´ A SOTILLO a a Facultad de Psicologı´a, Universidad Auto´ noma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain b Instituto Pluridisciplinar, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Abstract Contrary to what occurs with negative pictures, negative words are, in general, not capable of interfering with performance in ongoing cognitive tasks in normal subjects. A probable explanation is the limited arousing power of linguistic material. Especially intense words (insults and compliments), neutral personal adjectives, and pseudowords were presented to 28 participants while they executed a lexical decision task. Insults were associated with the poorest performance in the task and compliments with the best. Amplitude of the late positive component of the event-related potentials, originating at parietal areas, was maximal in response to compliments and insults, but latencies were delayed in response to the latter. Results suggest that intense emotional words modulate ongoing cognitive processes through both bottom-up (attentional capture by insults) and top-down (facilitation of cognitive processing by arousing words) mechanisms. Descriptors: Insults, Compliments, Attentional capture, Affective lexical decision (ALD) task, Parietal cortex, LPC Many emotional events show a capability for disrupting an on- going task. This effect allows cognitive resources to be reoriented to those events and allows organisms to rapidly process and react to this type of stimuli, which are often critical for the individual, such as threat or danger. It is usually assumed that the main factor underlying this interference caused by the onset of a salient or signal event is a reorientation of attention (Graham & Hackley, 1991; Ohman, Hamm, & Hugdahl, 2000; Siddle, Stephenson, & Spinks, 1983; Sokolov, 1963). However, emotional stimuli need to exceed a critical threshold value before they capture attention (Koster, Crombez, Van Damme, Verschuere, & De Houwer, 2004; Mogg & Bradley, 1998). This threshold depends on several factors, such as level of involvement in the ongoing cognitive task (Schwartz et al., 2005) and the individual’s state and trait characteristics (Mogg & Bradley, 1998). The third factor, particularly relevant for this study, is the nature and intensity of the emotional stimulus itself. There is a wide agreement that verbal emotional material is less arousing than other types of visual affective items such as facial expressions or emotional scenes (Keil, 2006; Kissler, Assadollahi, & Herbert, 2006; Mogg & Bradley, 1998; Vanderploeg, Brown, & Marsh, 1987). Consequently, verbal emotional material would be less capable of disrupting an ongoing cognitive task due to attentional capture than emotional pictorial stimuli. This disad- vantage for emotional words is particularly evident in the case of negative (unpleasant) stimulation. Although negative pictures clearly interfere with different cognitive tasks due to attentional capture (Constantine, McNally, & Hornig, 2001; Doallo, Holguin, & Cadaveira, 2006; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001), negative words produce less clear effects. Studies on cognitive interference by emotional words due to attentional capture usually employ standardized experimental paradigms such as emotional Stroop or affective lexical decision. Although data exist showing that negative words are indeed able to attract enhanced attention as compared to neutral words (see studies on attentional blink: Anderson & Phelps, 2001; Keil & Ihssen, 2004; Keil, Ihssen, & Heim, 2006), this enhancement appears not to be enough to produce interference effects in these standardized paradigms. As indicated, one of them is the emotional Stroop task or its variations, such as the emotional counting Stroop task (Whalen, Bush, Shin, & Rauch, 2006; Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996). This procedure explores whether performance in the ongoing cognitive task (color naming) is interfered with by bottom-up processes triggered by the emotional content of words whose color must be named. Whereas in subjects showing affective disorders such as anxiety or posttraumatic stress disorder there is a significant delay in color naming when negative nouns are presented, normal or control participants usually fail to show such interference (for a review, see Williams et al., 1996;see also Whalen et al., 2006, with This work was supported by the grants SEJ2005-08461-C02-01/PSIC and SEJ2004-07774/PSIC from the Ministerio de Educacio´ n y Ciencia of Spain, as well as by grant CCG06-UAM/SAL-0287 from the Comunidad de Madrid/Universidad Auto´ noma de Madrid. Address reprint requests to: Luis Carretie´ , Facultad de Psicologı´ a, Universidad Auto´ noma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: carretie@uam.es Psychophysiology, 45 (2008), 188–196. Blackwell Publishing Inc. Printed in the USA. Copyright r 2007 Society for Psychophysiological Research DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2007.00617.x 188