Abstract

Emotion words are often categorized into emotion-label words which refer to specific emotional states (e.g., happy, sad) and emotion-laden words which do not directly mention but embed emotional states (e.g., success, fail). This study aimed to investigate whether emotion words belonging to different categories are processed differently. Participants performed a lexical decision task on emotion-label and emotion-laden words in Experiment 1 and a valence decision task on the same words in Experiment 2. A series of linear mixed-effect models were conducted on response latencies (RTs) while lexical frequency, concreteness and emotionality of words were controlled for. The model results yielded that emotion-laden words were processed slower than emotion-label words, and that positive emotion words were processed faster than negative emotion words regardless of word categories. The slower RTs to emotion-laden words imply that the valence of the words is constructed through emotional experience requiring additional information processing. We insist that the informational processing of emotion-laden words is different from that of emotion-label words, independent of the concreteness and emotionality of emotional words.