BEING HAPPY AND SEEING HAPPY - EMOTIONAL STATE MEDIATES VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

Lexical decision and word-naming experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotions in visual word recognition. Emotional states o f happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the firs t two experiments, happy and sad participants (and neutral-emotion par ticipants in Experiment 2) made lexical decisions about letter-strings , some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the p erceiver was associated with facilitation of response to words categor ically related to that emotion (i.e. happy and sad words). However, su ch facilitation was not observed for words that were related by valenc e, but not category, to the induced emotions (i.e. love and anger word s). Evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word rec ognition was also observed in a third experiment that employed a word- naming task. Together the results support a categorical emotions model of the influences of emotion in information processing (Niedenthal, S etterlund, & Jones, 1994). Moreover, the result of the word-naming exp eriment suggests that the effects of emotion are evident at very early stages in cognitive processing.