Effect of Emotional Congruency and Cognitive Load on Word Processing

Existing research suggests that the modulation of emotional words to cognitive responses is multifaceted. As an important component of cognition, the influence of emotional words on working memory performance has received increasing attention from researchers. Various modalities of emotional stimuli, particularly facial expressions, are typically presented alongside emotional words to elucidate their associations. Previous studies have demonstrated that the congruency effect occurs when emotional words and faces share the same valence. However, the effect of other emotional modalities on emotional word processing in working memory under varying cognitive loads remains understudied. We implemented the delayed emotional conflict task, a dual-task paradigm that comprises a primary lexical recognition task and a secondary facial recognition task. Results reveal that emotional words, especially negative words, can disrupt working memory performance, and this effect strengthens as cognitive load increases. Notably, in the context of low cognitive load, neutral faces are likely to facilitate the processing of positive words. Additionally, in contrast to prior research, this study does not observe the congruency effect in conditions where the words and faces have the same valence (e.g., negative words and angry faces). These results indicate that both intrinsic valence and the valence of other modalities can modulate word processing in working memory tasks, and these modulations display distinct patterns across different cognitive loads. However, due to the features of stimuli and paradigm, no congruency effect is observed here.