Abstract
Emotion has important influence on language learning. However, the effect of emotion on syntactic learning has been relatively under-researched. Most previous studies used affective pictures, music or videos to induce positive or negative emotions before having participants perform the language learning tasks. The use of these materials is an explicit induction method that might unintentionally alter participants' motivation or result in the problem of demand characteristics. To avoid such procedural artifacts, we adopted an odor-based induction approach to examining the influence of positive and negative emotions on language learning. We found that after the odor-based induction, participants in the positive-emotion group were significantly happier and those in the negative-emotion group were significantly sadder. Compared with participants in the positive emotion condition, those in the negative emotion condition performed more accurately in the assessment task, although no significant difference was found in reaction times. These findings suggest that the protocol is effective in identifying the effect of emotion on language learning. The implications of this experimental paradigm are discussed.
