Abstract :
Keywords Emotional violation; N400; Facial expressions; Emojis; Emotion words Highlights * Emotional violations resulted in longer response times in happy context. * Emotional violations of facial expressions, emojis, and emotion words elicited robust N400 effects. * The emotional violation of words induced greater semantic retrieval demands than that of facial expressions and emojis. * The emojis enabled similar neural response to faces in emotional violation processing. Abstract Human social interactions depend on the construction of emotional meaning. The present study used event-related potentials to investigate the neural features of emotional violation processing in facial expressions, emojis, and emotion words. Behavioral results showed emotion congruency effects among facial expressions, emojis, and emotion words. Emotional violations resulted in a longer response time than emotion congruent conditions in happy context conditions. Responses to angry faces were slower in angry sentences than in happy sentences. As expected, the classic N400 effect was obtained for the emotional violations among facial expressions, emojis, and emotion words. Emotional violations resulted in more negative-going N400 amplitudes. Moreover, the N400 effects elicited by facial expressions and emojis were significantly smaller than emotion words, and there were no significant differences in N400 effects between facial expressions and emojis. The findings suggest that the emotional violation processing of facial expressions, emojis, and emotion words could be reflected in an electrophysiological index of semantic processing, and that emotional violation elicited higher levels of semantic retrieval. In addition, there were differences between nonverbal and verbal information processing in emotional violation, while the emotional violation of words induced greater semantic retrieval demands than facial expressions and emojis. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China (b) Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of Reading and Development in Children and Adolescents (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China * Corresponding author. Article History: Received 12 April 2022; Revised 28 July 2022; Accepted 2 August 2022 Byline: Linwei Yu (a), Qiang Xu [xuqiang1117@163.com] (a,*), Feizhen Cao (b), Jiabin Liu (a), Junmeng Zheng (a), Yaping Yang (a), Lin Zhang (a)