Moreno, E. M.
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Expectations are crucial in everyday life. People respond to good and bad outcomes not only based on the emotional valence of the outcome but also based on what they had `in mind´, what they expected. Language comprehension electrophysiological studies have shown that brains respond to words in context depending on allowed expectations that are made based on semantic memory and world-knowledge constraints. However, personality traits, cognitive bias, and defensive pessimism strategies might go beyond pure factual semantic and world-knowledge constraints and determine what might have been expected in a particular context at a particular point in time. Using the N400 component of event-related potentials as an index of word expectation, we explored how individuals reacted when processing some a priori highly expected emotionally negative and positive word endings in scenarios in which both types of expectations could be violated at random. Violations included switches to unexpected opposite emotional word endings and nonsense. Our results reveal that despite having a similarly high cloze probability, expected positive endings were processed as more 'surprising' than negative ones. Either the negative predictions were rather strongly made or individuals were somehow reluctant to make strong positive predictions in preparation for them to become untrue. By contrast, post-N400 frontal effects elicited by all types of emotionally opposite outcomes were similar regardless of the direction of the emotional switch. Thus, our brainwave study suggests that humans selectively adjust the strength of self-allowed positive and negative expectations before a verbal input comes in. During language comprehension tasks, just as in other life situations, individuals aim to encounter pleasant 'surprises' and minimize the consequences of emotional setbacks.