Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. Emotional categorisation deciding whether a word is emotional or not is a task that employs the explicit analysis of the emotional meaning of words.
Therefore, it allows for assessing the role of emotional factors, i. The aim of the current experiment was to investigate the role of subjective significance, a reflective form of activation that is similar to arousal the automatic form , in the processing of emotional meaning.
We applied the orthogonal manipulation of three emotional factors. Thus, we were able to precisely differentiate the effects of each factor and search for interactions between them. We expected valence to shape the late positive complex LPC component, while subjective significance and arousal were expected to shape the P and N components.
We observed the effects of subjective significance throughout the whole span of processing, while the arousal effect was present only in the LPC component. We also observed that amplitudes for N and LPC discriminated negative from positive valence.
The results showed that all factors included in the analysis should be taken into account while explaining the processing of emotion-laden words; especially interesting is the subjective significance, which was shown to shape processing individually, as well as to come into interaction with valence and arousal.
