Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Affective norms for 501 Chinese words from three emotional dimensions rated by depressive disorder patients

Introduction

Emotional words are often used as stimulus material to explore the cognitive and emotional characteristics of individuals with depressive disorder, while normal individuals mostly rate the scores of affective words. Given that individuals with depressive disorder exhibit a negative cognitive bias, it is possible that their depressive state could influence the ratings of affective words. To enhance the validity of the stimulus material, we specifically recruited patients with depression to provide these ratings.

Methods

This study provided subjective ratings for 501 Chinese affective norms, incorporating 167 negative words selected from depressive disorder patients' Sino Weibo blogs, and 167 neutral words and 167 positive words selected from the Chinese Affective Word System. The norms are based on the assessments made by 91 patients with depressive disorder and 92 normal individuals, by using the paper-and-pencil quiz on a 9-point scale.

Results

Regardless of the group, the results show high reliability and validity. We identified group differences in three dimensions: valence, arousal, and self-relevance: the depression group rated negative words higher, but positive and neutral words lower than the normal control group.

Conclusion

The emotional perception affected the individual's perception of words, to some extent, this database expanded the ratings and provided a reference for exploring norms for individuals with different emotional states.

Negative target stimuli do not influence cross-modal auditory distraction

The present study served to test whether emotion modulates auditory distraction in a serial-order reconstruction task. If auditory distraction results from an attentional trade-off between the targets and distractors, auditory distraction should decrease when attention is focused on targets with high negative arousal. Two experiments (with a total N of 284 participants) were conducted to test whether auditory distraction is influenced by target emotion. In Experiment 1 it was examined whether two benchmark effects of auditory distraction-the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect-differ as a function of whether negative high-arousal targets or neutral low-arousal targets are used. Experiment 2 complements Experiment 1 by testing whether target emotion modulates the disruptive effects of reversed sentential speech and steady-state distractor sequences relative to a quiet control condition. Even though the serial order of negative high-arousal targets was better remembered than that of neutral low-arousal targets, demonstrating an emotional facilitation effect on serial-order reconstruction, auditory distraction was not modulated by target emotion. The results provide support of the automatic-capture account according to which auditory distraction, regardless of the specific type of auditory distractor sequence that has to be ignored, is a fundamentally stimulus-driven effect that is rooted in the automatic processing of the to-be-ignored auditory stream and remains unaffected by emotional-motivational factors.

Positive and negative mood states do not influence cross-modal auditory distraction in the serial-recall paradigm

The aim of this study was to examine whether positive and negative mood states affect auditory distraction in a serial-recall task. The duplex-mechanism account differentiates two types of auditory distraction. The changing-state effect is postulated to be rooted in interference-by-process and to be automatic. The auditory-deviant effect is attributed to attentional capture by the deviant distractors. Only the auditory-deviant effect, but not the changing-state effect, should be influenced by emotional mood states according to the duplex-mechanism account. Four experiments were conducted to test how auditory distraction is affected by emotional mood states. Mood was induced by autobiographical recall (Experiments 1 and 2) or the presentation of emotional pictures (Experiments 3 and 4). Even though the manipulations were successful in inducing changes in mood, neither positive mood (Experiments 1 and 3) nor negative mood (Experiments 2 and 4) had any effect on distraction despite large samples sizes (N = 851 in total). The results thus are not in line with the hypothesis that auditory distraction is affected by changes in mood state. The results support an automatic-capture account according to which the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect are mainly stimulus-driven effects that are rooted in the automatic processing of the to-be-ignored auditory stream.