Conflict Detection In Affective Language Content: Affective Incongruency In Semantically Correct Sentences Describing Social Interactions Activates The Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Neurocognitive studies on the emotion-language relation report a significant influence of affective content on the level of single words. However, it is rather difficult to investigate such influence on the sentence level – partly due to a missing theoretical approach to integrate multiple affective meanings. In a previous EEG study, we used impression formation equations based on Affect Control Theory to calculate affective congruency of sentences describing social interactions to successfully predict ERP effects. The current study was crucially motivated by the assumption that the reported early effect of affective incongruency was related to automatic conflict detection associated with activation in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). To test this hypothesis, we replicated the study as an event-related fMRI design: we visually presented the same sentences to 23 participants (12 f, 11 m) in a silent reading reading task while measuring differences in the hemodynamic response in two conditions of affective congruency. The ROI analysis results showed expected enhancement of neural activity for affectively incongruent sentences in left ACC, supporting the assumption that affective language content influences meaning making already at basic semantic processing stages. The reported results represent a replication of neuroscientific evidence for ACT's mathematical model of impression formation.