Emotional distraction and facilitation across sense and time.

Abstract

Emotional stimuli can disrupt or enhance task performance according to factors that are presently poorly understood. One potentially important determinant is the sensory modality involved. In unimodal visual paradigms (visual task-irrelevant stimuli during a visual task) emotional stimuli frequently produce distraction effects; however, the effects across modalities appear more complex and may also depend on factors related to stimulus timing. It is entirely unclear how task-irrelevant visual stimuli impact auditory task performance in cross-modal paradigms. This project explored task performance as a function of sensory modality, emotional valence, and stimulus timing. In Study 1, participants (N = 50) completed a visual stimulus detection task in the presence of task-irrelevant negative and neutral images and sounds. Accuracy was disrupted in the presence of visual but not auditory emotional stimuli, particularly when the target and task-irrelevant stimulus appeared simultaneously. In Study 2, participants (N = 38) completed an equivalent auditory stimulus detection task. In sharp contrast to the effects observed with visual targets, response times and accuracy were enhanced in the presence of auditory emotional stimuli at the first timepoint but disrupted at later timepoints. However, there was no effect of task-irrelevant visual stimuli on auditory task performance. These findings demonstrate the importance of both sensory modality and timing in determining how emotional stimuli affect task performance and lay the groundwork for future studies examining the interaction between emotional and attentional processes.

The disruptive effects of changing-state sound and emotional prosody on verbal short-term memory in blind, visually impaired, and sighted listeners

“…It is important to note that the Bayesian evidence for a difference in prosody effects as a function of the visual status is only anecdotal and the interpretation of these differences in speculative and should be taken with caution. However, there was some indication of cognitive enhancement due to emotional prosody, and this might be consistent with other recent findings of emotional facilitation in the visual and auditory domain (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009;Stewart et al, 2022;Sussman et al, 2013). Under certain circumstances, cognitive performance may thus benefit from the presence of emotional prosody (in particular fearful voices), and individual differences in terms of auditory training or visual deprivation may account for these effects.…”