The Affective States Impact on N400 and P600 Amplitudes during Sentence Judgment Task: The Examination Focusing on the Affect Induction Method

Abstract

In this study, we controlled the relationship between participants and stimuli to reduce individual differences in the evoked affective states and examined whether the affective state impacts on N400 and P600 amplitudes of the ERP. Students who like dogs and had ones were presented films related to dogs. Half of 24 participants watched positive films (a positive group) and the remaining half watched negative ones (a negative group). After watching, a Japanese sentence-judgment task was completed by the participants. N400 to semantic violation was confirmed for both groups, and its amplitude was significantly larger for the positive group. In contrast, P600 to syntactic violation was confirmed only for the positive group. These results indicate that the affective states influenced on the sentence processing and it is possible to clearly confirm the influence of the affective states on sentence processing by controlling individual differences in the evoked affective states.