Emotional prosody rarely affects the spatial distribution of visual attention

Abstract

Emotional manipulations have been demonstrated to produce leftward shifts in perceptual asymmetries. However, much of this research has used linguistic tasks to assess perceptual asymmetry and there are therefore two interpretations of the leftward shift. It may reflect a leftward shift in the spatial distribution of attention as a consequence of emotional activation of the right hemisphere; alternatively it may reflect emotional facilitation of right hemisphere linguistic processing. The current study used two non-linguistic attention tasks to determine whether emotional prosody influences the spatial distribution of visual attention. In a dual-task paradigm participants listened to semantically neutral sentences in neutral, happy or sad prosodies while completing a target discrimination task (Experiment 1) and a target detection task (Experiments 2 and 3). There was only one condition in one experiment that induced perceptual asymmetries that interacted with emotional prosody, suggesting that task-irrelevant emotional prosody only rarely directs attention. Instead a more likely cause of the leftward perceptual shift for comprehension of emotional speech is facilitation of right hemisphere linguistic processing.