SENIOR PROJECTS:
Samira Amirazizi
Chris Garau
Lucie Jerome
Kelsey Leavy
Samira Amirazizi
Chris Garau
Lucie Jerome
Kelsey Leavy
Psychonomic Society Annual Conference 2015
Chapman University Student Research Day 2015 Our laboratory presented at the Psychonomic Society 2015 Annual Meeting. The conference was at Chicago, Illinois in November of 2015. We presented our preliminary results on different methodologies we have employed in tapping into the inference process for emotional language. |
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting 2014
2/6/2014
Our laboratory presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience 2014 Annual Meeting. The conference was at Boston, Massachusetts April 2014. Below is the abstract describing the work that we presented.
The lateralization of processing emotions or emotional language has been confounded by whether participants are experiencing the emotion or whether they are comprehending another’s emotional state (Beeman et al, 2000 vs Engles, et al, 2007). The right hemisphere has been linked to processing one's own emotions (Borod, 1992). In order to test if the right hemisphere also comprehends other’s emotional states, we developed two-sentence stimulus pairs that related a fictional characters positive, neutral, or negative emotion and required a causal inference to comprehend. Using a divided visual field paradigm, we were able to measure inference processing in each hemisphere separately by the response times and accuracy of target word recognitions. If the left-hemisphere, which is dominant for most language processes (Beeman and Chiarello, 1998) takes a primary role in this task, we expected to see a left-hemisphere advantage for forming inferences from neutral sentences. If the right hemisphere is better adapted to emotional language processing unrelated to the reader's own emotional state, we expected to see a right-hemisphere advantage for forming inferences from positive or negative sentences. The results show that readers made more causal inferences following positive and negative sentences when targets were presented to the right hemisphere and no differences between hemispheres following neutral sentences. These results support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is more adept at processing emotional language.
Find out more information about the CogNeuro conference here!
2/6/2014
Our laboratory presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience 2014 Annual Meeting. The conference was at Boston, Massachusetts April 2014. Below is the abstract describing the work that we presented.
The lateralization of processing emotions or emotional language has been confounded by whether participants are experiencing the emotion or whether they are comprehending another’s emotional state (Beeman et al, 2000 vs Engles, et al, 2007). The right hemisphere has been linked to processing one's own emotions (Borod, 1992). In order to test if the right hemisphere also comprehends other’s emotional states, we developed two-sentence stimulus pairs that related a fictional characters positive, neutral, or negative emotion and required a causal inference to comprehend. Using a divided visual field paradigm, we were able to measure inference processing in each hemisphere separately by the response times and accuracy of target word recognitions. If the left-hemisphere, which is dominant for most language processes (Beeman and Chiarello, 1998) takes a primary role in this task, we expected to see a left-hemisphere advantage for forming inferences from neutral sentences. If the right hemisphere is better adapted to emotional language processing unrelated to the reader's own emotional state, we expected to see a right-hemisphere advantage for forming inferences from positive or negative sentences. The results show that readers made more causal inferences following positive and negative sentences when targets were presented to the right hemisphere and no differences between hemispheres following neutral sentences. These results support the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is more adept at processing emotional language.
Find out more information about the CogNeuro conference here!