Emotional congruency between faces and words benefits emotional judgments in women: An event-related potential study

The present study aimed to investigate the effects of emotional congruency between faces and words on word evaluation through event-related brain potentials (ERPs). To this end, 20 women performed a face-word congruency task in which an emotional face was presented simultaneously with an affective word in a nonsuperimposed format. Participants had to evaluate the emotional valence of the word in three different conditions: congruent, incongruent, and control. The emotionally congruent words were categorized faster and more accurately than the incongruent ones. In addition, the emotionally congruent words elicited higher P3/LPP amplitudes than the incongruent ones. These results indicate a beneficial effect of emotional face-word congruency on emotional judgments of words.