EXPRESS: Emotional Arousal Effects in Visual Word Recognition Across Valence Types: Evidence from an Age-Continuous Sample of Korean Adults

The present study examined how the degree of emotional arousal of positive and negative valence words influences lexical processing and whether this effect varies across the adult lifespan. We analyzed lexical decision latencies for 1,544 emotionally salient words using data from the Korean Lexicon Project 2 (Kang et al., in preparation), which includes web-based lexical decision performance from 2,473 native Korean speakers aged 20 to 69 years. Because the Korean emotion-rating dataset exhibited a bimodal valence distribution with relatively few neutral words, age-by-arousal interactions were examined for positive and negative words separately. The patterns of arousal effects were different, depending on emotional valence: arousal facilitated word recognition for negative emotion words, whereas no such effect was observed for positive emotion words. Moreover, the arousal effect for negative emotion words was modulated by age: for participants in their 20s through 50s, higher-arousal negative words elicited faster responses than lower-arousal words, whereas this facilitative effect was absent among participants in their 60s, who showed relatively stable response times regardless of arousal level. This study represents the first large-scale investigation of affective word recognition in Korean using an age continuous sample of adult participants.