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Abstract

Many aspects of cognition, such as memory retrieval, decision-making, and the use of stereotypes, have been found to be sensitive to mood, the diffuse, objectless affective state the person is in. Although the exact mechanisms are hotly debated, the evidence suggests that people in a happy mood are more inclined to rely on heuristic processing strategies than people in a sad mood. Here we use ERPs to investigate whether mood also affects the use of heuristics (or 'educated guesses') to anticipate upcoming language as a sentence unfolds. Our findings show that mood can indeed modulate language comprehension, and can selectively make a heuristics-dependent P600 effect come and go. Such findings testify to the importance of studying the language-affect interface in psycholinguistics: it is not just that language, once understood, can change one's feelings and emotions -- the latter can alter the mechanisms by which we come to understand language in the first place.