Estudio de la interacción entre procesos lingüísticos y emocionales en el cerebro humano

Abstract

Current scientific literature has investigated the effects of emotions on language, not only in its semantic aspect, but also on syntactic processing, supposedly encapsulated and unrelated to any external modulation, until recently. Some ofthese studies have tried to establish the distinctive role of the emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) on these effects. The results to date have been very mixed, due in part to the use of different experimental designs. Therefore, it is not yet known precisely to what extent valence and emotional arousal are responsible for these modulations. This thesis aims to examine the electrophysiological correlates of valence dimension on language comprehension, under an experimental design that equates the positive, negative and neutral conditions, regardless of activation, also studied. For this, the stimuli of the three levels of valence are equated to the same activation. With the development of two tasks during the presentation of the stimulus (emotional words reading vs. emotional Stroop), it is possible to study the effects under different activation levels, as well as different cognitive effort and different memory load, and degree of access to semantic content...