Ira Fischler, Michael McKay, and Peter Lang. Emotion, Anxiety and Predictive Inferences in Reading: An ERP investigation.
    Anxious and nonanxious students read short context sentences that invited a predictive inference about potential outcomes (e.g., Your father collapses as he crosses the room..) The contexts were pleasant, unpleasant or neutral in emotional tone. Completion sentences were then shown, one word at a time, that either confirmed (He stops breathing and…) or disconfirmed (He stops smiling and…) the predictive outcome. For both groups, emotional context sentences were read more slowly than neutral sentences. Confirming target words were associated with a reduced N400 component in the ERPs, and this reduction was modulated by emotional tone and anxiety, with anxious students demonstrating smaller, rather than larger, N400 reductions to pleasant as well as unpleasant scenarios. Although both groups rated the confirming outcomes as more plausible than the disconfirming ones, this difference interacted with emotionality and anxiety, with the anxious students rating the confirmed unpleasant scenarios as especially plausible.