Responses to Semantically Neutral Words in Varying Emotional Intonations

Abstract

Purpose Recent research on perception of emotionally charged material has found both an “emotionality effect” in which participants respond differently to emotionally charged stimuli relative to neutral stimuli in some cognitive–linguistic tasks and a “negativity bias” in which participants respond differently to negatively charged stimuli relative to neutral and positively charged stimuli. The current study investigated young adult listeners' bias when responding to neutral-meaning words in 2 tasks that varied attention to emotional intonation. Method Half the participants completed a word identification task in which they were instructed to type a word they had heard presented binaurally through Sony stereo MDR-ZX100 headphones. The other half of the participants completed an intonation identification task in which they were instructed to use a SuperLab RB-740 button box to identify the emotional prosody of the same words over headphones. For both tasks, all auditory stimuli were semantically neutral words spoken in happy, sad, and neutral emotional intonations. Researchers measured percent correct and reaction time (RT) for each word in both tasks. Results In the word identification task, when identifying semantically neutral words spoken in happy, sad, and neutral intonations, listeners' RTs to words in a sad intonation were longer than RTs to words in a happy intonation. In the intonation identification task, when identifying the emotional intonation of the same words spoken in the same emotional tones of voice, listeners' RTs to words in a sad intonation were significantly faster than those in a neutral intonation. Conclusions Results demonstrate a potential attentional negativity bias for neutral words varying in emotional intonation. Such results support an attention-based theoretical account. In an intonation identification task, an advantage emerged for words in a negative (sad) intonation relative to words in a neutral intonation. Thus, current models of emotional speech should acknowledge the amount of attention to emotional content (i.e., prosody) necessary to complete a cognitive task, as it has the potential to bias processing.