Abstract

Although in everyday life emotions are expressed in a simple and spontaneous way also verbally, most experimental studies in psychology have used images as stimuli to elicit emotions, with the risk of providing an incomplete picture of the phenomenon. In recent years, the use of words with an emotional content as stimuli has made it possible to highlight some interesting aspects related to the verbal modality. In this article we examine the literature concerning electroencephalographic studies on this topic with reference to event-related potentials. The results highlight idiosyncratic aspects related to emotion-related words but, mostly, similarities between verbal and visual stimuli with an emotional content