RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article T1 Making sense of social interaction: Emotional coherence drives semantic integration as assessed by event-related potentials A1 Barber Friend, Horacio Ángel A1 Schauenburg, Gesche A1 Conrad, Markus A1 von Scheve, Christian A1 Ambrasat, Jens A1 Aryani, Arash A1 Schröder, Tobias AB We compared event-related potentials during sentence reading, using impression formation equations of a model of affective coherence, to investigate the role of affective content processing during meaning making. The model of Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise, 1979, 2007) predicts and quantifies the degree to which social interactions deflect from prevailing social norms and values – based on the affective meanings of involved concepts. We tested whether this model can predict the amplitude of brain waves traditionally associated with semantic processing. To this end, we visually presented sentences describing basic subject-verb-object social interactions and measured event-related potentials for final words of sentences from three different conditions of affective deflection (low, medium, high) as computed by a variant of the ACT model (Schröder, 2011). Sentence stimuli were closely controlled across conditions for alternate semantic dimensions such as contextual constraints, cloze probabilities, co-occurrences of subject-object and verb-object relations. Personality characteristics (schizotypy, Big Five) were assessed to account for individual differences, assumed to influence emotion-language interactions in information processing. Affective deflection provoked increased negativity of ERP waves during the P2/N2 and N400 components. Our data suggest that affective incoherence is perceived as conflicting information interfering with early semantic processing and that increased respective processing demands – in particular in the case of medium violations of social norms – linger on until the N400 time window classically associated with the integration of concepts into embedding context. We conclude from these results that affective meanings influence basic stages of meaning making. SN 1873-3514 YR 2019 FD 2019 LK http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/35408 UL http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/35408 LA en DS Repositorio institucional de la Universidad de La Laguna RD 29-jun-2024