Auditory And Cross-modal Attentional Bias To Negative Sounds

The definition of attentional bias is that, people tend to pay more attention to negative stimulus than neutral ones in environment. Previous researches adopted visual paradigm to investigate attentional bias toward negative stimulus, whose results indicated that only anxious people have attentional bias to negative information. Attentional bias may be the underlying cognitive sources of anxiety. There are two different components of attentional bias. One is engagement bias, which means it is harder to get rid of the negative stimulus compared with neutral ones. The other is disengagement bias, which means negative stimulus can holds attention more firmly than neutral ones. Large amount of studies has been done on both engagement bias and disengagement bias toward negative events, indicating that negative disengagement bias was exhibited by people with high anxiety, while the existence of engagement bias remained controversial. Even so, some researchers suggested that attentional bias is not only exhibited by anxious people. Pay attention to negative information, detect negative stimulus quickly and keep constant attention to them may be a fundamental mechanism that all of us have.This study aimed to provide evidence for auditory attentional bias to negative sounds under conditions of normal people. Experiment 1 used auditory adaption of dot-probe paradigm. The result provided evidence that when neutral and negative stimulus appeared simultaneously, normal people would show selective attentional bias to negative stimulus. By using auditory adaption of emotional spatial cuing paradigm, experiment 2 proved that attentional bias was constituted by engagement and disengagement bias. Various kinds of natural auditory stimulus were used in experiment 3. Attentional bias was further proved given the results that negative sounds were able to diminish the inhibition of return effect. In experiment 4, visual-audio cross-modal phenomena of engagement and disengagement bias was found by changing the audio targets to visual ones. These four experiments discussed attentional bias in various perspectives. We found that normal people have engagement and disengagement bias to negative information. Further, this research extends our understanding of attentional bias from vision to audition.