WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Halszka Bąk
Department of Pragmatics of English
(In)Visible Dimensions: Implicit Affect and Basic Emotion Categorizations in Emotion Terms
Abstract:
One of the fundamental assumptions of emotion research is that emotion terms carry implicit affective and emotional meaning. In this study we looked for correlations between explicit and implicit evaluations of affect and basic emotion categorizations of happiness and sadness in male and female voices. Raters evaluated valence, categorized the valence in the voices (explicit tasks), or engaged in free naming of the emotion. The responses in the free naming task were tagged for the implicit valence and basic emotion categories they carried. We found a strong correlation between the implicit and explicit categorizations by basic emotions in female voices expressing happiness and male voices expressing sadness. The results provide further support for the role of gender stereotyping as an important factor in emotion processing. The results are discussed with reference to the Behavioral Ecology View of Emotions. The implications of the results for the field of psycholinguistic research on emotions are discussed. The development of a new set of psycholinguistic tools for the study of emotions through language within the Basic Emotions Catalogue project is also briefly presented.
This material was originally presented during the 59th Psychonomics Meeting in New Orleans, LA, USA (15-18th November 2018) in the form of a poster. Co-author: Jeanette Altarriba, PhD (University at Albany – SUNY).
Rafał Jończyk
Department of Pragmatics of English
Engineering creativity: Prior experience modulates electrophysiological responses to novel metaphors
Abstract:
Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that novel metaphor comprehension provides a window on creative cognition (e.g. Beaty et al., 2017; Rataj et al. 2017; Rutter et al. 2012). We built on these findings and studied whether creative thinking is modulated by prior knowledge. We collected electrophysiological responses to literal, nonsense, and novel metaphorical sentences that were either referring to engineering knowledge (The wind tickled the turbine) or general knowledge (The earthquake inhaled the city) testing engineering and non-engineering students. Following Rutter et al. (2012), sentences differed in verb only and were classified in prior norming studies (n = 65) as highly unusual and highly appropriate (novel metaphors), low unusual and highly appropriate (literal sentences), and highly unusual and low appropriate (nonsense sentences).
In the EEG experiment, participants read sentences and made judgments about their unusualness and appropriateness. Ongoing EEG was time-locked to the verb and to the final word to assess the early and late stages of sentence comprehension. The results reveal an increased N400 to novel metaphors and nonsense sentences relative to literal sentences at the early processing stage for both participant groups. At the later stage, the N400 is maximal for nonsense sentences, followed by novel metaphors and then literal sentences. Notably, however, engineering novel metaphors lead to a decreased N400 compared to non-engineering novel metaphors in engineering students only, suggesting that prior knowledge affects novel metaphor comprehension. The findings will be interpreted within the framework of figurative language and creative cognition.
Co-authors of the study: Gül E. Kremer (Iowa State University), Zahed Siddique (Oklahoma State University), Janet van Hell (Pennsylvania State University).
References:
Beaty, Roger, E., Paul J. Silva, and Mathias Benedek. (2017). Brain networks underlying novel metaphor production. Brain Cogn. 111, 163–170.
Rataj, Karolina, Anna Przekoracka-Krawczyk, and Rob H.J. van der Lubbe (2017). On understanding creative language: the late positive complex and novel metaphor comprehension. Brain Res.
Rutter, Barbara, Sören Kröger, Holger Hill, Sabine Windmann, Christiane Hermann, and Anna Abraham. (2012). Can clouds dance? Part 2: an ERP investigation of passive conceptual expansion. Brain Cogn. 80, 301–310.
We wtorek 15 stycznia 2019 r. w godz. 11.00-12.30 w sali 109A Collegium Novum odbędzie się publiczna prezentacja projektu doktorskiego 
The Department of the History of English has the pleasure to announce that the next meeting of the HELL Reading Club this academic year will take place on Tuesday January the 15th at 4.45p.m, in Room C Collegium Martineum.
Guest lecture by dr. Rik Vosters (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) 17-18.01.2019
The Visit of Prof. dr. Rik Vosters, Free University Brussels, to the Department of Dutch and South African Studies, 17 & 18 January 2019
Przekład prof. Jerzego Kocha: Z Malty na scenę Nowego Teatru
The Department of the History of English has the pleasure to announce that the next meeting of the Fun with Old English study group this academic year will take place on Tuesday, January the 22nd, at 5:45 p.m. in Room C Collegium Martineum.
Przypominamy, że na zwycięzców czekają atrakcyjne nagrody.
Fundacja Onkologiczna Nadzieja
Canadian Literature in Perspective Reading Group (CLiP) cordially invites everybody interested in literary and cultural studies to the next meeting this academic year. The meeting will take place in 117a Collegium Novum on Tuesday, January 29, 2019.
Szanowni Państwo,
