Ira Fischler, David Goldman, Mireille Besson, Michael McKay, & Margaret Bradley. Effects of Emotionality of Words in Word Phrases on Event-Related Brain Potentials.
    Previous work has shown that viewing of individual emotionally evocative words (e.g., pleasure, rape) is associated with an enhanced late positivity in the  event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to those words, beginning as early as 350 ms after word onset. In the present study, emotional and neutral words were combined into two-word modifier-noun phrases (e.g., starving puppy) and presented visually with an SOA of 750 ms. When the task focused attention on the word pair as a  phrase (Experiment 1),  effects of the emotionality of the first word on the ERPs were absent, and those to the second word enhanced, compared to a task that focused attention on the individual words (Experiment 2). There was little effect of the emotional congruence between modifier and noun on the ERPs.  These results suggest that in normal discourse processing, the emergent emotional meaning of the phrase can supercede, rather than follow, any automatic emotional responses to individual words.