Abstract
Emotionally relevant stimuli and in particular anger are, due to their evolutionary relevance, often processed automatically and able to modulate attention independent of conscious access. Here, we tested whether attention allocation is enhanced when auditory stimuli are uttered by an angry voice. We recorded EEG and presented healthy individuals with a passive condition where unfamiliar names as well as the subject’s own name were spoken both with an angry and neutral prosody. The active condition instead, required participants to actively count one of the presented (angry) names. Results revealed that in the passive condition the angry prosody only elicited slightly stronger delta synchronization as compared to a neutral voice. In the active condition the attended (angry) target was related to enhanced delta/theta synchronization as well as alpha desynchronization suggesting enhanced allocation of attention and utilization of working memory resources. Altogether, the current results are in line with previous findings and highlight that attention orientation can be systematically related to specific oscillatory brain responses. Potential applications include assessment of non-communicative clinical groups such as post-comatose patients.
Highlights
Processing of emotional content of sensory stimuli has been demonstrated to be at least partially independent from voluntary top-down attention and has been shown to support bottomup allocation of attentional resources
We looked at brain dynamics of well-established frequency bands [27, 38] that have already been explored in an earlier version of this experimental paradigm [17]
The angry voice led to stronger responses than the neutral voice but only in the delta range from 200 to 400 ms after stimulus onset
Summary
Processing of emotional content of sensory stimuli has been demonstrated to be at least partially independent from voluntary top-down attention and has been shown to support bottomup allocation of attentional resources. Emotional processing seems to be, at least to some extent, automatic and independent from conscious perception. Emotional stimulus characteristics have been shown to modulate attention. Recent evidence clearly indicates that the emotional relevance of a stimulus can influence attention deployment and selection and prioritization of stimuli for further processing [5]. This has been suggested to result from their evolutionary and adaptive significance, due to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0159429. This has been suggested to result from their evolutionary and adaptive significance, due to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0159429 July 21, 2016
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