Evidence map›Paper›PMID 37633981›Full record

ArticleBMC psychology2023

The early negative bias of social semantics: evidence from behavioral and ERP studies.

Xinfang Fan, Qiang Xu, Juan Liu, Hongwei Xing, Liangyu Ning, Qingwei Chen, Yaping Yang

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In one paragraph

Article in BMC psychology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
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2citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

2 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Judgment of Learning Reactivity for Emotional Faces.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026
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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

7 authors.

Xinfang Fan *Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Qiang Xu *Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Juan LiuDepartment of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Hongwei XingDepartment of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Liangyu NingDepartment of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Qingwei ChenNational Center for International Research on Green Optoelectronics, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China.
Yaping YangDepartment of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China. yaping.yang@163.com.

Funding

the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of Ministry of Education of China No. 18YJC190027
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundCompared to nonsocial information, the human brain is more highly sensitive to social information. As a kind of typical social semantic information, the words describing person traits differ from the nonsocial semantic information describing inanimate objects in many ways. It remains to be seen whether the processing of trait words has a valence asymmetric and whether it differs from the processing of nonsocial semantic information in terms of behavioral responses and neural temporal processes.

methodTaking person and object names as priming stimuli and adjective words only used for describing humans or objects as target stimuli, the present study aimed to investigate the processing characteristics of social and nonsocial semantic information by recording both behavioral and ERP data.

resultsBehavioral results showed that the response times for negative words were significantly slower than those for positive words whether for social or nonsocial semantic information. The accuracy rates of negative words were significantly lower than those of positive words when the targets were social words which is contrary to the nonsocial words. The ERP results indicated that there was a negative bias effect on the processing of both types of information during the whole time course of brain neural activity; that is, the P2, N400, and LPP amplitudes elicited by negative words were larger than those elicited by positive words; However, the negative bias effect of social semantic information started at the early perceptual stage which was significantly earlier than the onset of negative bias of nonsocial semantic information, and was significantly affected by the prime type. In addition, there was a significant semantic conflict N400 effect only for nonsocial semantic information.

conclusionsOverall, the present study revealed the existence of an early negative bias of social information and provided evidence for the specificity of social information.

Indexed as

ElectroencephalographySemanticsBrainEvoked PotentialsExistentialismFemaleHumansMaleNegative biasP2Social semantic informationTrait wordsValence

Identifiers

PMID37633981
PMCPMC10464141

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