SynthesisPsychonomic bulletin & review2025
How does emotional content influence visual word recognition? A meta-analysis of valence effects.
Synthesis in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Effects of Individualized Arousal on Recognition Memory of Words.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Pupil- and gaze dynamics track emotion content in naturalistic speech.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Child's play: A computational method for generating child-specific valence norms.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- On the Relationship between Reading Abilities and Word Properties Involved in Word Recognition.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- The influence of individual differences in the processing of words expressing discrete emotions: data from a large-scale study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mapping Contributions of the Anterior Temporal Semantic Hub to the Processing of Abstract and Concrete Verbs.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The Flexible Role of Social Experience in the Processing of Abstract Concepts.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Research on the interplay between language and emotion has shown evidence that the affective content of words influences their recognition. However, the direction of the effects is not clear, as there are mixed findings regarding the role of positive and, especially, negative valence. We conducted a Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis to examine the role of valence in visual word recognition, focusing on the lexical decision task. The results revealed a facilitative effect of positive valence on lexical decision times. That is, positive words led to faster responses than both negative and neutral words. In contrast, negative valence did not have any effect, although the analysis of several moderator variables suggested that there might be a facilitative effect in some cases, specifically, when negative words elicit very strong and intense emotions. These results shed light on the complexities of emotional word processing. They also point to the need for psycholinguistic models to take affective information into account, and thus provide a complete view of visual word recognition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.