Hemispheric engagement during the processing of affective adjectives—an ERP divided visual field study

ABSTRACT

The study looked into the hemispheres’ involvement in emotional word encoding. It combined brain activity measures (ERPs) with behavioural data during the affective categorization task in the divided visual field presentation paradigm. Forty healthy right-handed student volunteers took part in the study, in which they viewed and evaluated 33 positive and 33 negative emotional adjectives presented to either the left or right visual field. We observed a marginally significant effect on the earlier time window (220–250 ms, the P2 component) with higher mean amplitudes evoked to the words presented to the right hemisphere, and then a strong effect on the 340–400 ms (the P3) with a reversed pattern (higher amplitudes for words presented to the left hemisphere). The latter effect was also visible in the error rates and RTs, with better overall performance for adjectives presented to the left hemisphere. There was also an effect on behavioural data of positive words only (higher error rates, shorter RTs). Thus, the study showed a particular “progression” pattern of hemispheric engagement: dependence of the initial stages of affective lexico-semantic processing on the right hemisphere, replaced by the left-hemispheric dominance for content evaluation and response programming stages.

KEYWORDS:

• Semantic analysis
• affective categorization
• visual attention
• P2
• P3

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (SG), upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, under grant 2016/23/D/HS6/01645