Régine Kolinsky

Long-lasting attentional influence of negative and taboo words in an auditory variant of the emotional Stroop task.

Using an auditory adaptation of the emotional and taboo Stroop tasks, the authors compared the effects of negative and taboo spoken words in mixed and blocked designs. Both types of words elicited carryover effects with mixed presentations and interference with blocked presentations, suggesting similar long-lasting attentional effects. Both were also relatively resilient to the long-lasting influence of the preceding emotional word. Hence, contrary to what has been assumed (Schmidt & Saari, 2007), negative and taboo words do not seem to differ in terms of the temporal dynamics of the interdimensional shifting, at least in the auditory modality.

When a bang makes you run away: Spatial avoidance of threatening environmental sounds

Environmental sounds can be powerful alarm signals. Hence, attentional orienting towards their location might occur extremely rapidly. Here, we used the beep probe task to investigate attentional biases to negative, positive and taboo sounds. While both left-presented negative and taboo sounds elicited attentional avoidance, taboo but not negative sounds triggered Inhibition of Return. Moreover, taboo sounds slowed participants responses, whatever the sound and beep locations. Positive sounds had no effect. Interestingly, although spatial effects specific to taboo sounds were related to their disgusting nature, their non-spatial effects were linked to their shocking/surprising trait. This is the first evidence of emotional sounds influence on spatial attentional orienting and of the involved emotional dimensions.

Effects of emotional spoken words on exogenous attentional orienting

Attentional biases linked to emotional stimuli were investigated in healthy people using an auditory adaptation of the cueing paradigm. Specifically, we investigated whether both validity effects elicited by predictive, endogenous cues and the Inhibition of Return phenomenon (IOR; Posner & Cohen, 1984) elicited by unpredictive, exogenous cues are influenced by the emotional content of spoken words. Supporting the idea that exogenous orienting is not an encapsulated phenomenon (Stolz, 1996), we found abolished IOR for negative words (Experiments 3 and 4). Thus, attention would not be prevented from returning to the previously explored location of a negative word. On the contrary, no emotional modulation of the validity effects was observed (Experiments 1 and 2), suggesting that the intervention of resource-demanding orienting strategies increased cognitive load and thus prevented any emotional modulation. Still, facilitative, nonspatial effects of negative words were found when initial attentional shifts elicited by the cue were both exogenous and endogenous (Experiment 1), but not when they were exclusively endogenous (Experiment 2). These results highlight the importance of both the negativity of a stimulus and the automaticity of attentional shifts in eliciting spatial and nonspatial attentional effects.