Ira Fischler, Romko Sikkema, Vincent Van Veen, Michelle Simmons, & Peter Lang. Emotion and attention in the comprehension of single words: An ERP analysis.
    Single words varying in emotional pleasantness, or valence, and arousal, were presented visually to undergraduate students, and event-related brain potentials to those words recorded. Over five experiments, the emotionally arousing words, whether pleasant or unpleasant, were associated with a late positive potential relative to the emotionally neutral, less arousing words. The presence, latency and magnitude of this emotionality effect was a function of the particular task to be done with the words: When the task involved consideration of emotionality, the late postivity emerged as early as 300 msec after word onset, and continued for nearly a half second. In contrast, when the task required semantic analysis on a different dimension of meaning, the late positivuty was smaller, did not appear until 450 msec post-onset, and lasted less than 300 msec. When a lexical decision was made to the words, there was only a small and insignificant late positivity for emotional words. Our results suggest that although the cortical  response to arousing words resembles that to emotionaly evocative pictures, it is less sustained, and more dependent on how the word is dealt with. There was no evidence for an early, preattentive effect of word emotionality on the ERPs.