Abstract

Hate speech is a verbal act that promotes prejudice, discrimination, and hostility toward members of specific groups, and it has recently emerginged as a serious social problem. Derogatory labels, a subtype of hate speech, reinforce prejudice and stereotypes against the target and desensitize violence by dehumanizing individuals. differ from simple group labels in terms of their psychological function and impact. However, little is known about the psycholinguistic characteristics of these expressions and how they affect emotional information processing. This study aimed to investigate the psycholinguistic features of Korean derogatory labels (Study 1) and examine their cognitive effects on emotional processing (Study 2). In Study 1, 132 participants rated 20 derogatory labels, 20 negative labels, and 20 neutral labels along 10 psycholinguistic dimensions: valence, arousal, emotional experience, abstractness, imageability, familiarity, subjective frequency, understanding of meaning, category entitativity, and category essentialism. Correlation analyses revealed that derogatory labels showed broader and more significant associations across psycholinguistic dimensions compared to negative labels. In Study 2, an emotional Stroop task was employed to examine how derogatory labels influenced participants’ emotional judgments of background facial expressions (happiness, anger). Even after controlling for valence, arousal, and subjective frequency of stimuli, derogatory labels significantly delayed emotional judgments for happy faces, indicating a cognitive interference effect. These findings suggest that derogatory labels differ from general negative expressions in their psycholinguistic profile and may especially disrupt the processing of positive social information.