Emotion words in lexical decision and reading aloud

Emotion can have facilitative effects on word processing with words that label emotions and/or have strong emotional associations (high valence and/or arousal) showing an advantage on word processing tasks. However, there has been little research on the production of emotion-label words. In this study, we examined emotion effects in production (reading aloud) and recognition (lexical decision), comparing processing of a large set of emotion-label words and non-emotion abstract words. Response latencies to emotion-label and non-emotion words did not differ in lexical decision but emotion-label words showed significantly faster response times in reading aloud. Valence and arousal did not significantly influence response times in either task. We suggest that the presence of an emotion-label advantage only in reading aloud and in the absence of valence/arousal effects points to a fragility of emotion effects. These findings contrast with previous studies which indicate a key role of valence and arousal in word processing.