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Abstract

Several aspects of cognition, such as memory retrieval, problem-solving and decision-making, have been found to be sensitive to a person's mood. The evidence suggests that people in a happy mood are more inclined to use heuristic, top-down processing strategies than people in a sad mood. Here we investigate whether mood also affects the use of heuristics to anticipate upcoming language. In constructions like "David praised Linda because...", verbs like "praise" heuristically lead readers to expect more information about the person who is praised (in this case, Linda), not the person praising. This so-called implicit causality bias can be so strong that gender-marked pronouns that subsequently disconfirm the expectation -- "he" in "David praised Linda because he..." -- elicit a P600 effect in ERPs (Van Berkum et al., 2007), indicating that such pronouns are briefly taken to be problematic. We reasoned that if people process information more heuristically in a happy mood than in a sad mood, and if such mood-dependent shifts in processing strategy can affect the mechanism involved in language comprehension, a change in mood should modulate the size of this heuristics-based P600 effect. In a two-session EEG experiment, we used short film clips to manipulate the mood of participants who read short stories in which verb-based expectations were confirmed or disconfirmed with a gender-marked pronoun. When readers were in a happy mood, bias-inconsistent pronouns elicited a clear P600 effect, but when the same readers were in a sad mood, no such effect was observed. Importantly, standard morpho-syntactic subject-verb agreement violations (e.g., "The boys was…") elicited a P600 effect in either mood. This supports the idea that mood selectively modulates the use of conceptual heuristics during language comprehension. Moreover, it reveals that language-relevant ERP effects can come and go as a function of general mood state.