Never Say No … How the Brain Interprets the Pregnant Pause in Conversation

Sara Bögels; Kobin H. Kendrick; Stephen C. Levinson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145474

Never Say No … How the Brain Interprets the Pregnant Pause in Conversation

Sara Bögels, Kobin H. Kendrick, Stephen C. Levinson

Language and Linguistic Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers, and the like are more likely to occur with a delay–conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses make, either when relatively fast (300 ms after question offset) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard short dialogues contrasting in speed and valence of response while having their EEG recorded. We found that a fast ‘no’ evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast ‘yes’; however, this contrast disappeared in the delayed responses. 'No' responses, however, elicited a late frontal positivity both if they were fast and if they were delayed. We interpret these results as follows: a fast ‘no’ evoked an N400 because an immediate response is expected to be positive–this effect disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a ‘no’ has increased. However, regardless of the latency of response, a ‘no’ response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, in immediate response.

Original language	English
Article number	e0145474
Journal	PLoS ONE
Volume	10
Issue number	12
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0145474
Publication status	Published - 23 Dec 2015

Bibliographical note

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10.1371/journal.pone.0145474

Bögels et al. (2015)
© 2015 Bögels et al
Final published version, 1.51 MBLicence: CC BY

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0145474&representation=PDF

Cite this

@article{d426564619bb4459a1cfcd623b5e2c8d,

title = "Never Say No … How the Brain Interprets the Pregnant Pause in Conversation",

abstract = "In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers, and the like are more likely to occur with a delay–conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load {\textquoteleft}yes{\textquoteright} and {\textquoteleft}no{\textquoteright} responses make, either when relatively fast (300 ms after question offset) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard short dialogues contrasting in speed and valence of response while having their EEG recorded. We found that a fast {\textquoteleft}no{\textquoteright} evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast {\textquoteleft}yes{\textquoteright}; however, this contrast disappeared in the delayed responses. 'No' responses, however, elicited a late frontal positivity both if they were fast and if they were delayed. We interpret these results as follows: a fast {\textquoteleft}no{\textquoteright} evoked an N400 because an immediate response is expected to be positive–this effect disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a {\textquoteleft}no{\textquoteright} has increased. However, regardless of the latency of response, a {\textquoteleft}no{\textquoteright} response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, in immediate response.",

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