Effects Of Emotion On Word Processing And Processing

Emotions“represent complex psychological and physiological states that, to a greater or lesser degree, index occurrences of value” (Dolan, 2002). Therefore it is not surprising to say emotion influences human cognition, but how does emotion impacts cognitive processing is not very clear. Historically most psychologists viewed cognition and emotions as two separate fields. Nevertheless, in past two decades a growing body of evidence showed cognition and emotion are very closely interdependent. Psycholinguists are studying effects of emotion on word processing and word recognition; both are known to be cognitive demands. Experiments conducted in this area are usually involving emotional valence, which specifies whether stimulus is positive or negative, and emotional arousal, which defines the emotional intensity that has linked with the stimulus which can be associated to physiological activation (Briesemeister
, Kuchinke & Jacobs
,

One alternative model example is the discrete emotion theory. This theory suggests emotions are discretely categorised and further differentiated in at least five discrete categories- happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust- that are identifiable by facial and vocal expressions across all human cultures (Hewig et al., 2005), these expressions are believed to be innate. This theory controls stimuli for emotional valence and arousal levels. However, It is not plausible to provide some evolutionary explanation for this model. Nonetheless, contextual learning has been linking stimulus material to discrete emotions. Emotion categories learnt in childhood may influence individual perception of discrete emotions in different circumstances. This mechanism is most likely moderated by the use of language; this is linked to phylogenetically old brain systems responsible for emotional processes (Briesemeister, Kuchinke& Jacobs,