Processing fearful and neutral sentences: Memory and heart rate change

Abstract

Thirty college student subjects were instructed to process fearful or neutral sentences on cue. Cue tones were presented randomly within a repetitive series of non-signal tones (1 every 6sec). A change in tone frequency (higher or lower) was the signal to recall either the fearful or the neutral member of a previously memorised sentence pair. At the first signal for retrieval, and depending on group assignment, subjects engaged in one of three text processing tasks: null task (i.e. subjects were told not to process the sentence at this first cue), silent articulation of the sentence, or imagery of the text content. A second retrieval signal followed the first, at which time all subjects did the imagery task. Fearful sentences resulted in greater heart rate acceleration than neutral sentences. This affective discrimination was greatest for imagery (during both processing periods), but it was also apparent during articulation, and even to some extent during null sentence processing. This result was interpreted as evidence of spread of activation from language propositions to response propositions, consistent with the associative network structure of fear described in bio-information processing theory.