Abstract
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.
Highlights
When auditory distraction is studied in the lab, emotional states are often seen as an extraneous influence on performance that has to be controlled
The aim of the present study is to test the effect of mood on auditory distraction in four well-powered studies, relying on effective mood-induction procedures and the well-established serial-recall paradigm to assess the behavioural effects of auditory distraction on working memory
All multivariate test criteria correspond to the same exact F statistic which is reported
Summary
When auditory distraction is studied in the lab, emotional states are often seen as an extraneous influence on performance that has to be controlled. Researchers often try to create emotionally neutral settings in laboratory experiments and the analysis of auditory distraction focuses only on the cognitive aspects of performance (for reviews, see [1, 2]). Students may have to ignore auditory distractors when taking a fear-inducing exam; workers in open-plan offices may have to maintain their concentration in the face of background noises on exciting and unpleasant workdays alike. This raises the question of whether results on auditory distraction obtained in highly controlled, emotionally neutral settings can be generalized to emotionally.
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