Title |
Font Size Matters—Emotion and Attention in Cortical Responses to Written Words
|
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Published in |
PLOS ONE, May 2012
|
DOI | 10.1371/journal.pone.0036042 |
Pubmed ID | |
Authors |
Mareike Bayer, Werner Sommer, Annekathrin Schacht |
Abstract |
For emotional pictures with fear-, disgust-, or sex-related contents, stimulus size has been shown to increase emotion effects in attention-related event-related potentials (ERPs), presumably reflecting the enhanced biological impact of larger emotion-inducing pictures. If this is true, size should not enhance emotion effects for written words with symbolic and acquired meaning. Here, we investigated ERP effects of font size for emotional and neutral words. While P1 and N1 amplitudes were not affected by emotion, the early posterior negativity started earlier and lasted longer for large relative to small words. These results suggest that emotion-driven facilitation of attention is not necessarily based on biological relevance, but might generalize to stimuli with arbitrary perceptual features. This finding points to the high relevance of written language in today's society as an important source of emotional meaning. |
X Demographics
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United States | 12 | 20% |
United Kingdom | 6 | 10% |
France | 4 | 7% |
Norway | 4 | 7% |
Australia | 2 | 3% |
Egypt | 2 | 3% |
Canada | 2 | 3% |
Sweden | 1 | 2% |
Netherlands | 1 | 2% |
Other | 6 | 10% |
Unknown | 21 | 34% |
Demographic breakdown
Type | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Members of the public | 47 | 77% |
Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) | 6 | 10% |
Scientists | 6 | 10% |
Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 2 | 3% |
Mendeley readers
Geographical breakdown
Country | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom | 2 | 2% |
Netherlands | 1 | <1% |
South Africa | 1 | <1% |
Czechia | 1 | <1% |
Switzerland | 1 | <1% |
Canada | 1 | <1% |
Spain | 1 | <1% |
United States | 1 | <1% |
Poland | 1 | <1% |
Other | 0 | 0% |
Unknown | 118 | 92% |
Demographic breakdown
Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Student > Master | 24 | 19% |
Student > Ph. D. Student | 23 | 18% |
Researcher | 12 | 9% |
Student > Bachelor | 12 | 9% |
Student > Doctoral Student | 9 | 7% |
Other | 25 | 20% |
Unknown | 23 | 18% |
Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
---|---|---|
Psychology | 36 | 28% |
Business, Management and Accounting | 8 | 6% |
Computer Science | 8 | 6% |
Medicine and Dentistry | 7 | 5% |
Social Sciences | 7 | 5% |
Other | 31 | 24% |
Unknown | 31 | 24% |