Interaction between Emotion and Cognition: Electrophysiological Correlates of Emotional Meaning Processing

This work aims to investigate the interaction processes between cognition and emotion in primary school children, focusing on linguistic processes from a neurophysiological perspective. Cognition and emotion are two key aspects of development that dynamically influence each other. It is widely acknowledged that cognitive functions are the basis of learning processes and that emotions significantly influence cognitive processes. The first chapter of this thesis focuses on the scientific literature on emotion and cognition, emphasizing their inseparability in achieving a deeper understanding of mental processes and behavior. It also highlights the central role of language, concepts, and words as fundamental organizing elements of thought and action. Emotional words are linked to embodied emotional concepts; therefore, studying their neural correlates through psychophysiological techniques such as electroencephalography is relevant. The second chapter examines how emotional words can differentiate from non-emotional words at the electrophysiological level. Specifically, event-related potentials are used to study the electroencephalographic response to emotional and neutral words during an emotional categorization task in primary school children. Finally, the third chapter investigates the possible relationships between spontaneous brain activity measured by resting electroencephalography and emotional and cognitive measures collected in children. In particular, two electrophysiological indices that have been variously indicated as informative on cognitive and affective processes are used, namely the ratio between theta and beta waves and frontal alpha asymmetry. The results of this work represent a first attempt to address the gap in the scientific literature regarding the neurophysiology of emotions in relation to linguistic processes during development, particularly in primary school children. By recording event-related potentials (ERPs) during an emotional word categorization task, we observed a more positive modulation of the Late Positive Potential (LPP) for emotional words compared to neutral words. This finding suggests that emotional words engage greater attentional resources than neutral words in primary school children. Interestingly, this LPP modulation was associated with resting-state frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA), a neural index that has been variably linked to individual affective characteristics. This result provides novel evidence that LPP modulations may reflect individual affective differences. Emotional words, indeed, serve an organizing function in thought and action, supporting concept formation and offering a valuable window into the structure of affective experience. Furthermore, we identified a potential link between spontaneous neural activity during resting state and both self-reported emotional traits and cognitive performance in primary school children. Although the mechanisms linking resting-state activity to emotional traits and laboratory or real-life cognitive performance remain unclear, this finding reinforces the connection between electrophysiological and behavioral measures.