Love, Laugh, Life – The effect of empathy on the processing of emotion-label, emotion-laden and neutral abstract words

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.