Affective neurolinguistics: towards a framework for reconciling language and emotion

Standard neurocognitive models of language processing have tended to obviate the need for incorporating emotion processes, while affective neuroscience theories have typically been concerned with the way in which people communicate their emotions, and have often simply not addressed linguistic issues. Here, we summarise evidence from temporal and spatial brain imaging studies that have investigated emotion effects on lexical, semantic and morphosyntactic aspects of language during the comprehension of single words and sentences. The evidence reviewed suggests that emotion is represented in the brain as a set of semantic features in a distributed sensory, motor, language and affective network. Also, emotion interacts with a number of lexical, semantic and syntactic features in different brain regions and timings. This is in line with the proposals of interactive neurocognitive models of language processing, which assume the interplay between different representational levels during on-line language comprehension.