Abstract:This study examines the neural mechanisms involved in the processing of Chinese emotion-label and emotion-laden words using silent reading tasks, and explores the effect of word emotional valence on this process.The results reveal that valence has a significant influence on the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words during the early perceptual processing stage.Negative emotion-laden words elicit an enhanced N170 compared to negative emotion-label and positive emotion-laden words in the left hemisphere.Additionally, both negative emotion-laden and positive emotion-label words produce an amplified N170 in the left hemisphere compared to the right hemisphere.During the semantic processing stage, emotion-laden words generate a larger early posterior negativity (EPN) compared to emotion-label and neutral words.Furthermore, during the elaborate processing stage, positive emotion-laden and negative emotion-label words evoke a larger late positive component (LPC) compared to neutral words.Spatio-temporal segmentation analysis reveals that neutral, positive emotion-label, and positive emotion-laden words elicit identical microstates with no significant difference in their duration.However, negative emotion-label and negative emotion-laden words evoke different microstates, which differ from neutral, positive emotion-label, and positive emotion-laden words.These findings suggest that there is neural dissociation between emotion-label and emotion-laden words, which is modulated by valence.Therefore, processing models of emotional words should consider the emotional word type.