Abstract
For visual stimuli of emotional content as pictures and written words, stimulus size has been shown to increase emotion effects in the early posterior negativity (EPN), a component of event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing attention allocation during visual sensory encoding. In the present study, we addressed the question whether this enhanced relevance of larger (visual) stimuli might generalize to the auditory domain and whether auditory emotion effects are modulated by volume. Therefore, subjects were listening to spoken words with emotional or neutral content, played at two different volume levels, while ERPs were recorded. Negative emotional content led to an increased frontal positivity and parieto-occipital negativity—a scalp distribution similar to the EPN—between ~370 and 530 ms. Importantly, this emotion-related ERP component was not modulated by differences in volume level, which impacted early auditory processing, as reflected in increased amplitudes of the N1 (80–130 ms) and P2 (130–265 ms) components as hypothesized. However, contrary to effects of stimulus size in the visual domain, volume level did not influence later ERP components. These findings indicate modality-specific and functionally independent processing triggered by emotional content of spoken words and volume level.
Highlights
From an evolutionary perspective, the rapid detection of threats or life-sustaining opportunities is important for survival and fast adaptation and explains the outstanding importance of emotional stimuli for humans
The present study aimed at investigating the interplay of volume level and emotional content in spoken words
We presented words of positive, negative, and neutral content in two different volume levels while recording event-related potentials (ERPs)
Summary
The rapid detection of threats or life-sustaining opportunities is important for survival and fast adaptation and explains the outstanding importance of emotional stimuli for humans. This modulation is evident on the behavioral level in better memory performance (Kissler et al, 2007, 2009; Bayer et al, 2011), faster response latencies (Keil et al, 2005; Schacht and Sommer, 2009a,b; Bayer et al, 2011), and higher accuracies (Schacht and Sommer, 2009b) for emotional compared to neutral stimuli. The preferential processing of emotional stimuli is evident in event-related brain potentials (ERPs). An ERP component being modulated by emotional content of stimuli from different domains is the early posterior negativity (EPN).
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