ArticleScientific reports2025
Love, laugh, life-the effect of empathy on the processing of emotion-label, emotion-laden and neutral abstract words.
Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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
1 citing paper in PubMed.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
While there is accumulating evidence that emotional words are processed faster than neutral words, findings regarding processing differences between emotion-label and emotion-laden words are inconsistent, potentially due to uncontrolled word- or participant-specific characteristics. We therefore analyzed lexical decision reaction times for emotion-label, emotion-laden, and neutral abstract words, while controlling for subjective differences in word valence, arousal, concreteness, and interoception, as well as considering inter-individual differences in empathy. We neither replicated the facilitatory emotionality effect for emotion-label or emotion-laden compared to neutral word processing nor found evidence for a reaction time difference between emotion-label and -laden words. Notably, however, results showed a word type-specific effect of empathy: Participants reacted faster to specifically emotion-label words, the higher their empathy. Additional exploratory analyses confirmed a word-type-specific gradual pattern, with stronger association of emotion-label than emotion-laden than neutral words with absolute valence, arousal and interoception. These analyses yet again revealed a word-type-specific modulation by empathy, wherein emotion-label words' ratings were significantly enhanced by empathy. Individual differences in empathy thus seem to affect specifically the processing of emotion-label words and the evaluation of their affective properties. Our findings underline the importance to consider word- and participant-specific characteristics in research on the semantic processing of emotional abstract words.
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