Research

The emotional connotation of a word can shift depending on its sentential context. For example, the word holiday may be perceived as positive in isolation, but in a sentence such as "Holidays are stressful," its emotional tone changes to negative. In my dissertation project, I explored how such contextual modulation of emotional meaning operates in older adults, focusing on two questions.

First, prior research in social and developmental psychology suggests that older adults tend to exhibit a positivity bias—a preference for attending to and remembering positive information. How do older adults retrieve emotional meanings of words and update them when placed in positive versus negative contexts, compared to younger adults?

Second, when encountering emotionally ambiguous sentences, are older adults more likely than younger adults to predict or expect upcoming positive content rather than negative content?

As a postdoctoral researcher, I am developing a second line of research investigating how individual listener characteristics influence emotional speech processing, with a particular focus on bilingual experience and musical expertise, using MEG.

Prior studies have shown that older adults often experience reduced comprehension of emotional prosody compared to younger adults. In contrast, both bilingualism and musical training have been independently associated with enhanced sensitivity to emotional prosody. This raises an intriguing question: Can mastering a second language—whether a spoken language or the "language" of music—help older adults better recognize emotions in speech?

Interestingly, both second-language (L2) speakers and musicians have also been linked to reduced sensitivity to negative emotional content, possibly reflecting greater emotion regulation or inhibitory control. This project thus also tests whether bilinguals and musicians are better able to inhibit unwanted or conflicting emotional information in speech compared to monolinguals and non-musicians.

Another line of my research explores how personality traits shape emotional language processing. While language comprehension involves a range of cognitive mechanisms—including attention, perception, memory, and cognitive control—personality traits influence emotional, motivational, and cognitive tendencies that guide how individuals respond to their environment. Despite these links, the ways in which personality traits modulate different stages and types of language comprehension, including both literal and non-literal language, remain relatively underexplored.

Some of the questions I have investigated include:

1. How do trait extraversion and neuroticism influence the processing of emotional word meanings in healthy younger adults?
   
   

2. How do personality traits affect the temporal dynamics of brain activity during joke comprehension? For example: “What will the banana become after it falls from the third floor? Eggplant.”
   
   

3. How does trait mindfulness modulate task-related functional connectivity during the generation of emotional experiences?