The long-term goal of the project is to understand how the emotional content of written language influences attention and comprehension during reading. The real-time dynamics of these processes are revealed in pattern of cortical activity seen in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The proposed studies will examine how variations in emotional reactivity or intensity (e.g., differences in level of anxiety) and in working memory capacity of individuals influence these emotional responses to written language. We are interested in how such individuals understand and use linguistic contexts, from single-word primes to narrative discourse, at three different points: first, as contexts that potentially predict emotionally pleasant or unpleasant outcomes are read; second, during an anticipatory period between context and completion in which attention is either maintained on the context or distracted from it; and third, as completions/outcomes are read that confirm or disconfirm these expectations. Our overarching hypotheses are that anxious individuals will have an attentional bias toward unpleasant or threatening events that will be engaged by narrative contexts, and at least to some degree, even single-word contexts, and that this will lead to heightened reactivity as the context is read, greater sustained attention to unpleasant scenarios during both filled and unfilled intervals, and greater expectations that outcomes will be unpleasant. We are interested in how working memory capacity modulates both the context effects in general, and the differences between anxious and nonanxious individuals.
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