Tracking and updating emotional information in daily language use is essential for
successful comprehension and communication. Using an event-related potential technique,
we investigated how the updating of emotional information was influenced by changes in
topic with two-pair conversational discourses. The first pair established a topic and a kind of
emotional information. The second pair either maintained or changed the topic of the first
pair. The description of the topic within the second pair contained a critical word that either …