This study was supported by the key project [18AYY003] of the National Social Science Foundation of China, the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education (MOE Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities), Beijing Foreign Studies University, and the post-funded project of Beijing Foreign Studies University [2019SYLHQ012].

The experiment was approved by the Ethics Committee of Beijing Foreign Studies University and it complied with the guideline for experiments with human subjects. All subjects in this research provided written informed consent.
1. Stimuli construction
<ol>
	<li>Design experimental stimuli based on the specific research questions. As this study is intended to examine foreign language learning using a semi-artificial language, create the experimental sentences by rearranging sentences in the participants&#39; native language in accordance with the grammatical rules of the tested foreign language. Sample experimental sentences are provided in Table 2. 
	NOTE: As our study was intended to investigate the learning of Japanese grammar by Chinese learners, a semi-artificial language (Chipanese) was generated with the vocabulary of Chinese and the syntax of Japanese. The experimental sentences were adapted from the experimental stimuli used in Liu, Xu, and Wang27.</li>
</ol>

<img src="/files/ftp_upload/60773/60773table2c.jpg" />
Table 2: Sample experimental sentences used in this study. Sentence (a) is a Chinese sentence and (b) is its Japanese equivalence. Sentence (c) is the experimental stimuli generated by rearranging sentence (a) in accordance with the syntactic structure of (b). This semi-artificial language was first designed by Liu, Xu, and Wang27.
<ol start="2">
	<li>Select representative grammatical structures in the tested language. Make sure to include a variety of grammatical structures to maintain the grammatical complexity and diversity of a natural language. 
	NOTE: Four grammatical structures were tested in our study, including two simple grammatical structures (SOV, SIOV) and two complex ones ([SOV]SV, [OSV]SV). The lexical frequency of nouns and verbs was matched between different types of sentences.</li>
	<li>For the training phase, design at least 20 sentences for each grammatical structure in the tested language for the grammaticality judgment task. The grammatical and ungrammatical sentences should be counterbalanced and controlled for lexical variables such as lexical frequency and number of strokes.</li>
	<li>For the testing phase, design at least 12 sentences for each grammatical structure in the tested language. Make half of the sentences grammatical and the other half ungrammatical. The grammatical and ungrammatical sentences should be counterbalanced and controlled for lexical variables.</li>
	<li>Randomize the sentences and design the experiment.
	<ol>
		<li>Randomize the sentences before presenting them to the participants in both the training phase and the testing phase. Find the &#39;Selection&#39; tab on the Property Page in the stimulus presentation software and set the selection method to &#39;Random&#39;.</li>
		<li>Divide the experiment into blocks with each lasting for no more than 10 min.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
</ol>
2. Participant recruitment and preparation for the experiment
<ol>
	<li>Recruit participants who have no reading difficulties and no background in the foreign language that will be tested. Make sure participants have normal or corrected-to-normal vision.</li>
	<li>Randomly assign the participants into two groups (an experimental group and a control group), with each group containing at least 30 members. Ensure the two groups do not differ in years of education or gender ratio.</li>
	<li>Inform the participants that they should be free from exhaustion, hunger, illness, or other conditions that make them uncomfortable on the day of the experiment.</li>
	<li>Invite the participants individually or in groups to the laboratory.</li>
</ol>
3. Procedure
<ol>
	<li>Take the participants to the laboratory room and instruct them to sit down at computer workplaces.</li>
	<li>Ask the participants to read and sign the written informed consent forms.</li>
	<li>Have the participants complete emotion induction.
	<ol>
		<li>Give the participants the pencil-and-paper version of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) pictorial rating scale28,29. Ask participants to rate their emotion by using pencils to mark the corresponding manikin. 
		NOTE: The Self-Assessment Manikin scale is a non-verbal assessment tool to measure the three dimensions of emotion (i.e., valence, arousal, and dominance). The scale we administered was a nine-point scale that ranges from one to nine in each of the three dimensions.</li>
		<li>Instruct participants in the experimental group to listen to the positively-valenced music through headphones for 10 min. 
		NOTE: In this study, Good Time was used to induce positive emotion. A pilot study was implemented in a group of 20 participants to test the validity of the music in emotional induction, and results indicated that participants rated their emotion as significantly more positive after the induction, which showed that the music was effective in placing participants in the positive affective state. Participants in the control group were not exposed to any emotionally-loaded materials. Rather, they proceeded directly to the learning task.</li>
		<li>Give participants the pencil-and-paper version of the Self-Assessment Manikin scale28,29 and ask them to rate their emotional states.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Ask participants to perform the training task.
	<ol>
		<li>Present the following written instructions on the computer screens to inform participants that they will learn a language containing the vocabulary in their native language and a new grammar: &#34;Welcome to our experiment! In this experiment, you will be required to learn a new language that contains Chinese words and a new grammar. When you are ready, press any key to proceed to the experiment.&#34;</li>
		<li>Present the following written instructions on the computer screens to instruct participants to perform the learning task: &#34;Next, you will see some sentences on the screen. Please observe them carefully and decide whether they are grammatical or not. Press &#39;1&#39; if the sentences are grammatical, and &#39;0&#39; if they are ungrammatical. After each response, you will receive a feedback reply (&#39;CORRECT!&#39; or &#39;INCORRECT!&#39;) and the correct sentence will be presented. Press any key to proceed to the learning task.&#34;</li>
		<li>Have the participants judge the grammatical acceptability of the sentences on the computer screen with a press of the button (&#39;1&#39; for grammatical and &#39;0&#39; for ungrammatical) and present a reply (&#39;CORRECT!&#39; or &#39;INCORRECT!&#39;) on the screen after each response. Present the correct structures after the replies to reinforce the effect of learning.</li>
		<li>When all trials are completed, present the following written instructions on the computer screens to inform participants that the training task is over: &#34;The learning task is completed!&#34;</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Give participants the pencil-and-paper version of the Self-Assessment Manikin scale28,29 and ask them to rate their emotional conditions.</li>
	<li>Ask participants to perform the grammaticality judgment task for the testing session.
	<ol>
		<li>Present the following written instructions on the computer screens: &#34;Please continue to answer similar questions. Please decide whether the grammatical structures of the sentences are correct. Press &#39;1&#39; if you think they are correct and press &#39;0&#39; if you think they are incorrect. You will be given seven seconds to respond. If you fail to respond within the time limit, the next question starts automatically. Press any key to start the experiment.&#34;</li>
		<li>Have participants read the sentences shown on the screen and judge the grammaticality of the sentences with a button press (&#34;1&#34; for grammatical and &#34;0&#34; for ungrammatical).</li>
		<li>When all trials are completed, present the following written instruction on the computer screens to inform participants that the task is over: &#34;The end. Thank you for your participation!&#34;</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>Ask the participants to fill in a questionnaire about their demographic details. Prepare their payment during the questionnaire.</li>
	<li>Provide the monetary compensation or reward to participants.</li>
</ol>
4. Data analysis
<ol>
	<li>Collect data from the output files from the stimulus presentation software.</li>
	<li>Perform an ANOVA analysis with emotion (positive, control) and sentence type (SOV, SIOV, OSVSV, SOVSV) as the independent variables and the average accuracy of learning as the dependent variable to explore the effect of emotion on accuracy.</li>
	<li>Perform an ANOVA analysis with emotion (positive, control) and sentence type (SOV, SIOV, OSVSV, SOVSV) as the independent variables and the average RTs as the dependent variable to explore the effect of emotion on RTs.</li>
</ol>

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The results indicate that participants rated their emotions to be significantly more positive after being exposed to the positively-valenced music. These subjects were significantly happier than the control group. This suggests that our emotion manipulation was successful. Participants in the positive-emotion group were found to be significantly less accurate and efficient than those in the control group. One possible reason is that participants employed an inductive strategy in grammar learning, resulting in a strong re...

Emotions play a crucial role in various cognitive activities such as perception, learning, reasoning, memorization, and problem solving. Because language learning requires attention, reasoning, and memorization, emotions may have significant influence on language learning outcomes1. Several prior studies have explored the effect of induced emotions on word production or text comprehension2,3, and have consistently found that emotion had a crucial influence on the two language processes. For example, Egidi and Caramazza found that positive emotion increased the sensitivity to inconsistency in text comprehension in the brain areas specific for inconsistency detection, whereas negative emotion increased the sensitivity to inconsistency in less specific areas2. Hinojosa et al. examined the effect of induced mood on word production and discovered that negative mood impaired the retrieval of phonological information during word production3. In spite of the evidence showing that emotions have a marked impact on text comprehension and word production, it is still not clear whether emotions affect grammar learning, one of the essential aspects of language learning. The present study aimed to explore the effect of learners&#39; emotional states on grammar learning.
Language and emotion are two primary components of human experience4. Their relationships have mostly been explored by studies in affective neurolinguistics. At the single word level, previous studies have consistently found that emotional features, such as arousal or valence, significantly affect the processing of individual words5,6,7. Specifically, some studies have identified a significant advantage for positive words5, and other studies have found an advantage for both positive and negative words7. Although some studies have reported an interaction between valence and arousal, a lack of significant interaction was reported in other research4. The picture is more complex at the level of sentence processing. Previous studies have explored issues concerning the interaction between emotional content and syntactic or semantic unification processes during sentence comprehension. Emotional information has been found to exert different influences on the processing of gender or number features4. Further, positive and negative emotion was connected with different agreement effects4. For instance, positive emotional features facilitated number agreement processing, whereas negative emotional features inhibited these processes4. At the semantic level, emotional features influenced semantic unification processes in both sentence and discourse contexts through the activation of the brain regions involved in single word processing and combinatorial semantic processes4. A review of the previous literature indicates that most prior research has focused on the effects of emotional information on the comprehension of words, sentences, and texts8,9, or the neural basis of emotional effects on language production10,11. However, how individuals&#39; affective states might influence language processing or learning has been largely overlooked.
The most frequently used approach to the studies of emotions in grammar learning is the artificial grammar learning paradigm. Several studies have used artificial grammar tasks to examine the effect of emotion on the learning of a new language12. First introduced by Reber in 196713, the artificial grammar learning paradigm is characterized by the use of non-meaningful materials, such as number strings or non-word letter strings, which are in fact generated by an underlying grammar. Researchers usually exposed participants in different emotional states (positive, neutral, or negative) to the number strings or letter strings presented either visually or audibly and measured their learning outcomes. Studies with the artificial grammar approach typically consist of a training session and a testing session. In the training session, participants are instructed to observe or memorize a list of symbol sequences that are generated from a finite state grammar. Participants are informed that the sequences follow a particular set of rules, but they are not given any details regarding these rules. In the testing session, participants are presented with new symbol sequences, some of which are grammatical and others are not. They are then required to judge whether the strings are grammatical or not. Artificial grammar tasks allow the instantiation of various theories of learning, such as rules, similarity, and associative learning theories14. This approach can effectively minimize the influence of lexical factors on the learning of grammatical rules, as artificial languages are made up of numbers, letters, or other meaningless symbols, rather than words in natural languages. However, many researchers have argued that the knowledge acquired in artificial grammar learning may represent statistical properties that are different from the features of natural grammar used by human beings15. Evidence from neurological studies shows that the grammars in natural languages are processed differently from the finite-state grammars used in artificial grammar learning tasks16,17. Therefore, artificial grammar learning tasks may not reflect the learning of human languages. Studies of the emotion effect on grammar learning using artificial grammars are more likely to reveal how emotion influences statistical learning, rather than the learning of natural grammars in human languages. It is not entirely clear whether findings from the meaningless stimuli can be generalized to foreign language learning.
The present study intended to adopt a semi-artificial language paradigm to investigate the effect of emotion on grammar learning. Semi-artificial language tasks were first introduced by Williams and Kuribara to examine language learning. A semi-artificial language is generated with the combination of lexicon in the learners&#39; native language and the grammar of a different language. An example of such language can be found in Williams and Kuribara&#39;s study18. Williams and Kuribara designed a novel semi-artificial language, Japlish, which followed the word order and case-marking rules of Japanese but used English vocabulary18. Sample Japlish sentences in their study are provided in Table 1.
<table border="1" fo:keep-together.within-page="1">
	<tbody>
		<tr>
			<td>Structure</td>
			<td>Examples</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>SV</td>
			<td>Horse-ga when fell?</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>SOV</td>
			<td>Pilot-ga that runway-o saw</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>SIOV</td>
			<td>Student-ga dog-ni what-o offered?</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>S when what-o V?</td>
			<td>Bill-ga when what-o sang?</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>S who-ni what-o V?</td>
			<td>That doctor-ga who-ni what-o showed?</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>S [SOV]V</td>
			<td>John-ga angrily Mary-ga that ring-o lost that said.</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>OS[SV]V</td>
			<td>That disease-o vet-ga cow-ga have that declared.</td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>
Table 1: Sample sentences in a semi-artificial language. The sentences were generated with English lexis and Japanese syntax. The sentences in the table are from Williams and Kuribara&#39;s study18.
As shown in the table, although English words are used, they are combined into sentences in accordance with the Japanese word order and case-marking rules. The Japlish sentences are all verb-final and nouns are case-marked for subject (-ga), indirect object (-ni), or object (-o). A detailed description of Japlish can be found in Grey et al.&#39;s study19. Semi-artificial language tasks involve a training phase and a testing phase. During the training phase, participants are instructed to learn a new language, and in the testing phase, they are required to perform acceptability judgment tasks or sentence-picture matching tasks. The accuracy and reaction times (RTs) of their responses are recorded to assess their learning performance.
Semi-artificial language tasks have mainly three advantages: First, as semi-artificial languages are created using grammatical rules in a new language, the tasks can minimize the influence of prior knowledge of the structures as well as language transfer19. Second, the tasks enable us to control and manipulate the type and amount of exposure participants receive19. In this way, they allow for more accurate assessment of the learning effects. Finally, as the grammars used in semi-artificial language tasks are from human languages, the tasks allow us to measure how participants acquire natural grammars, rather than artificial ones. In this aspect, they are more advantageous than artificial grammar tasks in which sequences of numbers or letters are used instead of real words. The use of natural grammar makes us more confident to conclude that the findings obtained are applicable to natural language learning. Given that prior studies have demonstrated learning effects using the semi-artificial language paradigm20,21,22, it is a useful approach to investigating issues in language learning that are difficult to isolate in the complex context of natural language research. However, semi-artificial language tasks are only applicable to foreign languages that are structurally different from learners&#39; native languages. If the tested language is structurally similar to the learners&#39; native language, it might make the former indistinguishable from the latter.
Compared with the tasks using natural languages, semi-artificial language tasks allow for a more objective assessment of the effects of emotion on grammar learning. This is because words in natural languages are closely associated with specific grammatical functions. For example, inanimate nouns (e.g., desk, nail) are more likely to function as the patients of verbs. Thus, it is difficult to differentiate the performance of vocabulary learning from that of grammar learning because the two are interrelated and inseparable in natural languages. As emotions have been found to have vital influence on word processing23,24, they may have indirect influence on grammar learning. Therefore, it is not easy to clearly differentiate the effect of emotion on vocabulary learning from that on grammar learning. This problem can be easily solved in semi-artificial language tasks because these tasks allow for the separation of vocabulary from grammar, and thus enable us to identify the effect of emotion on grammar learning, without having to worry about the interference from lexical learning.
Although the semi-artificial language paradigm has been used in some studies to investigate linguistic knowledge in second language acquisition25,26, this approach has rarely been used to explore learners&#39; individual differences in emotional conditions in foreign language learning. In this study, we intended to explore how positive induced emotion influences grammar learning using a semi-artificial language. Findings from this study have important implications for foreign language teaching and learning.

<table><tbody><tr><td>E-prime</td><td>PST</td><td>2.0.8.22</td><td>Stimulus presentation software</td></tr><tr><td>Computer</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td><td>Used to present stimuli and record subjects&#039; responses</td></tr><tr><td>Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM)</td><td>N/A</td><td>N/A</td><td>Used to assess subjects&#039; affective states. From Lang (1980)&lt;sup&gt;29&lt;/sup&gt;</td></tr></tbody></table>

experimental paradigm for measuring the effect of induced emotion on grammar learning

Previous studies have found that emotion has significant influence on the learning of foreign language vocabulary and textual comprehension. However, little attention has been given to the effect of induced emotion on grammar learning. This research examined the influence of positive induced emotion on the learning of Japanese grammatical rules among a group of learners with Chinese as their native language, using a semi-artificial language (i.e. Chipanese), which combines the grammatical rules of Japanese and the vocabulary of Chinese. Music was used to invoke positive emotional conditions in participants. Participants were required to learn Chipanese sentences in a training session through practice and then a grammaticality judgment task was administered to measure learning outcomes. We found that participants in positive emotional states performed less accurately and efficiently than those in the control group. The findings suggest that the protocol is effective in identifying the effect of positive induced emotion on grammar learning. The implications of this experimental paradigm for investigating foreign language learning are discussed.

The aim of this study is to explore the effect of positive induced emotion on foreign language grammar learning. For this purpose, two groups of participants were recruited to participate in the experiment, including a positive-emotion group (15 female, Mage = 20.20, age range: 18&#8211;27) and a control group (16 female, Mage = 20.33, age range: 18&#8211;26). Each group consisted of 30 participants. The two groups did not differ significantly in age, t (58) = -0.215, ...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning at JoVE.com

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

Here, we present a protocol to measure the effect of positive induced emotion on grammar learning in foreign language learners using a semi-artificial language that integrates the grammatical rules of a foreign language with the lexicon of the learners&#39; native language.

Previous studies have found that emotion has significant influence on the learning of foreign language vocabulary and textual comprehension. However, ...

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5.9K Views.  Beijing Foreign Studies University. Here, we present a protocol to measure the effect of positive induced emotion on grammar learning in foreign language learners using a semi-artificial language that integrates the grammatical rules of a foreign language with the lexicon of the learners' native language.

Video: Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation

The ability to control/regulate emotions is an important coping mechanism in the face of emotionally stressful situations. Although significant progress has been made in understanding conscious/deliberate emotion regulation (ER), less is known about non-conscious/automatic ER and the associated neural correlates. This is in part due to the problems inherent in the unitary concepts of automatic and conscious processing1. Here, we present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of both deliberate and automatic ER using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This protocol allows new avenues of inquiry into various aspects of ER. For instance, the experimental design allows manipulation of the goal to regulate emotion (conscious vs. non-conscious), as well as the intensity of the emotional challenge (high vs. low). Moreover, it allows investigation of both immediate (emotion perception) and long-term effects (emotional memory) of ER strategies on emotion processing. Therefore, this protocol may contribute to better understanding of the neural mechanisms of emotion regulation in healthy behaviour, and to gaining insight into possible causes of deficits in depression and anxiety disorders in which emotion dysregulation is often among the core debilitating features.

We present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of deliberate and automatic emotion regulation, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This protocol can be used in healthy participants, both young and older, as well as in clinical patients.

The ability to control/regulate emotions is an important coping mechanism in the face of emotionally stressful situations. Although significant progress ...

Neuroscience

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Memory-Enhancing Effect of Emotion

Emotional events tend to be better remembered than non-emotional events1,2. One goal of cognitive and affective neuroscientists is 
to understand the neural mechanisms underlying this enhancing effect of emotion on memory. A method that has proven particularly influential in the 
investigation of the memory-enhancing effect of emotion is the so-called subsequent memory paradigm (SMP). This method was originally used to investigate the 
neural correlates of non-emotional memories3, and more recently we and others also applied it successfully to studies of emotional memory (reviewed in4, 5-7). 
Here, we describe a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the memory-enhancing effect of emotion using the SMP in conjunction with 
event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). An important feature of the SMP is that it allows separation of brain activity specifically 
associated with memory from more general activity associated with perception. Moreover, in the context of investigating the impact of emotional stimuli, 
SMP allows identification of brain regions whose activity is susceptible to emotional modulation of both general/perceptual and memory-specific processing. 
This protocol can be used in healthy subjects8-15, as well as in clinical patients where there are alterations in the neural correlates of emotion perception 
and biases in remembering emotional events, such as those suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)16, 17.

We present a protocol that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural correlates of the memory-enhancing effect of emotion. This protocol allows identification of brain activity specifically linked to memory-related processing, contrary to more general perceptual processing, and can be used with healthy and clinical populations.

Emotional events tend to be better remembered than non-emotional events1,2. One goal of cognitive and affective neuroscientists is 
to understand the ...

Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition

Emotions can impact cognition by exerting both enhancing (e.g., better memory for emotional events) and impairing (e.g., increased emotional distractibility) effects (reviewed in 1). Complementing our recent protocol 2 describing a method that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the memory-enhancing effect of emotion (see also 1, 3-5), here we present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural correlates of the detrimental impact of emotion on cognition. The main feature of this method is that it allows identification of reciprocal modulations between activity in a ventral neural system, involved in 'hot' emotion processing (HotEmo system), and a dorsal system, involved in higher-level 'cold' cognitive/executive processing (ColdEx system), which are linked to cognitive performance and to individual variations in behavior (reviewed in 1). Since its initial introduction 6, this design has proven particularly versatile and influential in the elucidation of various aspects concerning the neural correlates of the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on cognition, with a focus on working memory (WM), and of coping with such distraction 7,11, in both healthy 8-11 and clinical participants 12-14.

We present a protocol that allows investigation of the neural mechanisms mediating the detrimental impact of emotion on cognition, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This protocol can be used with both healthy and clinical participants.

Emotions can impact cognition by exerting both enhancing (e.g., better memory for emotional events) and impairing (e.g., increased emotional ...

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

The ability to recall the past allows us to report on details of previous experiences, from the everyday to the significant. Because recall memory is commonly assessed using verbal report paradigms in adults, studying the development of this ability in preverbal infants and children proved challenging. Over the past 30 years, researchers have developed a non-verbal means of assessing recall memory known as the elicited or deferred imitation paradigm. In one variant of the procedure, participants are presented with novel three-dimensional stimuli for a brief baseline period before a researcher demonstrates a series of actions that culminate in an end- or goal-state. The participant is allowed to imitate the demonstrated actions immediately, after a delay, or both. Recall performance is then compared to baseline or to performance on novel control sequences presented at the same session; memory can be assessed for the individual target actions and the order in which they were completed. This procedure is an accepted analogue to the verbal report techniques used with adults, and it has served to establish a solid foundation of the nature of recall memory in infancy and early childhood. In addition, the elicited or deferred imitation procedure has been modified and adapted to answer questions relevant to other aspects of cognitive functioning. The broad utility and application of imitation paradigms is discussed, along with limitations of the approach and directions for future research.

The elicited imitation procedure was established to examine the development of recall memory in infancy and early childhood. This procedure has been widely used to establish a solid foundation of the nature of recall memory in infancy and early childhood.

The ability to recall the past allows us to report on details of previous experiences, from the everyday to the significant. Because recall memory is ...

The Emotional Stroop Task: Assessing Cognitive Performance under Exposure to Emotional Content

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The difference shows that people are affected by the emotional content conveyed by the carrier words even though they are irrelevant to the color-naming task at hand. The ESE has been widely deployed with patient populations, as well as with non-selected populations, because the emotion words can be selected to match the tested pathology. The ESE is a powerful tool, yet it is vulnerable to various threats to its validity. This report refers to potential sources of confounding and includes a modal experiment that provides the means to control for them. The most prevalent threat to the validity of existing ESE studies is sustained effects and habituation wrought about by repeated exposure to emotion stimuli. Consequently, the order of exposure to emotion and neutral stimuli is of utmost importance. We show that in the standard design, only one specific order produces the ESE.

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than those of neutral words. This report refers to potential sources of confounding and includes a modal experiment that provides the means to control for them.

The emotional Stroop effect (ESE) is the result of longer naming latencies to ink colors of emotion words than to ink colors of neutral words. The ...

Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood

Effective regulation of emotion is one of the most important skills that develops in childhood. Research interest in this area is expanding, but empirical work has been limited by predominantly correlational investigations of children's skills. Relatedly, a key conceptual challenge for emotion scientists is to distinguish between emotion responding and emotion regulatory processes. This paper presents a novel method to address these conceptual and methodological issues in child samples. An experimental paradigm that assesses the effectiveness with which children regulate emotion is described. Children are randomly assigned to use specific emotion regulation strategies, negative emotions are elicited with film clips, and changes in subsequent psychophysiology index the extent to which emotion regulation is effective. Children are instructed to simply watch the emotion-eliciting film (control), distract themselves from negative emotions (cognitive distraction), or reframe the situation in a way that downplays the importance of the emotional event (cognitive reappraisal). Cardiac physiology, continuously acquired before and during the emotional task, serves as an objective measure of children's unfolding emotional responding while viewing evocative films. Key comparisons in patterns of obtained physiological reactivity are between the control and emotion regulation strategy conditions. Representative results from this approach are described, and discussion focuses on the contribution of this methodological approach to developmental science.

A detailed protocol for an experimental paradigm to assess the effectiveness with which children regulate emotion is described. Children are randomly assigned to use specific emotion regulation strategies, negative emotions are elicited with film clips, and changes in subsequent psychophysiology index the extent to which emotion regulation is effective.

Effective regulation of emotion is one of the most important skills that develops in childhood. Research interest in this area is expanding, but empirical ...

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing and the perception of the visual world. The recording of eye-gaze patterns has provided good evidence for the contribution of both the visual context and linguistic/world knowledge to language comprehension. Initial research assessed object-context effects to test&#160;theories of modularity in language processing. In the introduction, we describe how subsequent investigations have taken the role of the wider visual context in language processing as a research topic in its own right, asking questions such as how our visual perception of events and of speakers contributes to&#160;comprehension informed by&#160;comprehenders&#39; experience. Among the examined aspects of the visual context are actions, events, a speaker&#39;s gaze, and emotional facial expressions, as well as spatial object configurations. Following an overview of the eye-tracking method and its different applications, we list the key steps of the methodology in the protocol, illustrating how to successfully use it to study visually-situated language comprehension. A final section presents three sets of representative results and illustrates the benefits and limitations of eye tracking for investigating the interplay between the perception of the visual world and language comprehension.

The present article reviews an eye-tracking methodology for studies on language comprehension. To obtain reliable data, key steps of the protocol must be followed. Among these are the correct set-up of the eye tracker (e.g., ensuring good quality of the eye and head images) and accurate calibration.

The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction between language processing ...

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies

The confounding factors of unexpectedness and semantic integration difficulty naturally residing in anomalous sentences in language studies make it difficult to determine the underlying processing mechanism of ERP components. Unlike the traditional static approach of manipulating expectancy through corpus frequency or cloze probability, this protocol proposes a dynamic method to enhance participants&#39; expectancy for rarely-met anomalous sentences by multiple repetitions while maintaining their semantic integration difficulties. To address the time cost increase resulting from multiple repetitions, this protocol proposes to repeat only the strictly simplified core structure extracted from the anomalous sentence before presenting the semantically enriched, much more informative complete anomalous sentence containing the anomalous core structure to reinitiate the semantic integration processing. The complete anomalous sentence elicited a P600 effect. It suggests that the participants did not give up processing the anomalous information after repetitions and the same semantic integration difficulty was successfully reinitiated. Importantly, the representative experimental results reveal that the greatly attenuated N400 effect caused by multiple repetitions was not recovered by the follow-up reinitiated semantic integration difficulty. It suggests that the attenuated N400 effect should be mainly attributed to the enhancement of expectancy for anomalous information by multiple repetitions. The experimental results show that this method can effectively enhance participants&#39; expectancy for anomalous sentences while retaining the semantic integration difficulty.

We present a protocol to dissociate the intertwining factors of integrative difficulty and unexpectedness in semantically anomalous sentences by applying multiple repetitions to enhance participant&#39;s expectancy for anomalous sentences. The dissociation helps to investigate the major contributor of elicited event-related potentials (ERP) effects such as N400 in language studies.

The confounding factors of unexpectedness and semantic integration difficulty naturally residing in anomalous sentences in language studies make it ...

A Cross-Disciplinary and Multi-Modal Experimental Design for Studying Near-Real-Time Authentic Examination Experiences

Over the past ten years, research into students&#39; emotions in educational environments has increased. Although researchers have called for more studies that rely on objective measures of emotional experience, limitations on utilizing multi-modal data sources exist. Studies of emotion and emotional regulation in classrooms traditionally rely on survey instruments, experience-sampling, artifacts, interviews, or observational procedures. These methods, while valuable, are mainly&#160;dependent on participant or observer subjectivity and is limited in its authentic measurement of students&#39; real-time performance to a classroom activity or task. The latter, in particular, poses a stumbling block to many scholars seeking to objectively measure emotions and other related measures in the classroom, in real-time.
The purpose of this work is to present a protocol to experimentally study students&#39; real-time responses to exam experiences during an authentic assessment situation. For this, a team of educational psychologists, engineers, and engineering education researchers designed an experimental protocol that retained the limits required for accurate physiological sensor measurement, best-practices of salivary collection, and an authentic testing environment. In particular, existing studies that rely on physiological sensors are conducted in experimental environments that are disconnected from educational settings (e.g., Trier Stress Test), detached in time (e.g., before or after a task), or introduce analysis error (e.g., use of sensors in environments where students are likely to move). This limits our understanding of students&#39; real-time responses to classroom activities and tasks. Furthermore, recent research has called for more considerations to be covered around issues of recruitment, replicability, validity, setups, data cleaning, preliminary analysis, and particular&#160;circumstances (e.g., adding a variable in the experimental design) in academic emotions research that relies on multi-modal approaches.

An experimental design was developed to investigate the real-time influences of an examination experience to assess the emotional realities students experience in higher education settings and tasks. This design is the result of a cross-disciplinary (e.g., educational psychology, biology, physiology, engineering) and multi-modal (e.g., salivary markers, surveys, electrodermal sensor) approach.

Over the past ten years, research into students&#39; emotions in educational environments has increased. Although researchers have called for more studies ...

EEG Study on Recognizing Familiar Speakers in Expressive Speech

Memorization-Based Training and Testing Paradigm for Robust Vocal Identity Recognition in Expressive Speech Using Event-Related Potentials Analysis

Recognizing familiar speakers from vocal streams is a fundamental aspect of human verbal communication. However, it remains unclear how listeners can still discern the speaker's identity in expressive speech. This study develops a memorization-based individual speaker identity recognition approach and an accompanying electroencephalogram (EEG) data analysis pipeline, which monitors how listeners recognize familiar speakers and tell unfamiliar ones apart. EEG data captures online cognitive processes during new versus old speaker distinction based on voice, offering a real-time measure of brain activity, overcoming limits of reaction times and accuracy measurements. The paradigm comprises three steps: listeners establish associations between three voices and their names (training); listeners indicate the name corresponding to a voice from three candidates (checking); listeners distinguish between three old and three new speaker voices in a two-alternative forced-choice task (testing). The speech prosody in testing was either confident or doubtful. EEG data were collected using a 64-channel EEG system, followed by preprocessing and imported into RStudio for ERP and statistical analysis and MATLAB for brain topography. Results showed an enlarged late positive component (LPC) was elicited in the old-talker compared to the new-talker condition in the 400-850 ms window in the Pz and other wider range of electrodes in both prosodies. Yet, the old/new effect was robust in central and posterior electrodes for doubtful prosody perception, whereas the anterior, central, and posterior electrodes are for confident prosody condition. This study proposes that this experiment design can serve as a reference for investigating speaker-specific cue-binding effects in various scenarios (e.g., anaphoric expression) and pathologies in patients like phonagnosia.

Author Spotlight: Investigating the Impact of Emotional Prosodies on Voice Recognition and Perception

The study introduces a training-testing paradigm to investigate old/new effects of event-related potentials in confident and doubtful prosodic scenarios. Data reveals an enhanced late positive component between 400-850 ms at Pz and other electrodes. This pipeline can explore factors beyond speech prosody and their influence on cue-binding target identification.

Recognizing familiar speakers from vocal streams is a fundamental aspect of human verbal communication. However, it remains unclear how listeners can ...