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This study set out to examine the valence effect on the explicit and implicit processing of Chinese emotion-label and emotion-laden words with emotional categorisation task (ECT) and emotional Stroop task (EST). Behaviourally, the dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words was only observed in the ECT and was modulated by valence. Neurophysiologically, a negative bias was found in the early perceptual processing stage (N170). In the second processing stage, the dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words was modulated by valence (P2 and EPN). In the elaborate processing stage, the neural dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words was modulated by the processing level (frontal N400 and early LPC). Valence interacted with processing level (late LPC). This study verifies the three-stage model of emotional word processing and extends it by adding two factors—processing level and emotional word type—into the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In discourse comprehension, we need to draw inferences to make sense of discourse. Previous neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural correlates of causal inferences in discourse understanding. However, these findings have been divergent, and how these types of inferences are related to causal inferences in logical problem-solving remains unclear. Using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach, the current meta-analysis analyzed 19 experiments on causal inferences in discourse understanding and 20 experiments on those in logical problem-solving to identify the neural correlates of these two cognitive processes and their shared and distinct neural correlates. We found that causal inferences in discourse comprehension recruited a left-lateralized frontotemporal brain system, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), and the bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), while causal inferences in logical problem-solving engaged a nonoverlapping brain system in the frontal and parietal cortex, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the bilateral middle frontal gyri, the dorsal MPFC, and the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Furthermore, the pattern similarity analyses showed that causal inferences in discourse understanding were primarily related to the terms about language processing and theory-of-mind processing. Both types of inferences were found to be related to the terms about memory and executive function. These findings suggest that causal inferences in discourse understanding recruit distinct neural bases from those in logical problem-solving and rely more on semantic knowledge and social interaction experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]