Differential interference effects of negative emotional states on subsequent semantic and perceptual processing

Abstract

Past studies have revealed that encountering negative events interferes with cognitive processing of subsequent stimuli. The present study investigates whether negative events affect semantic and perceptual processing differently. Presentation of negative pictures produced slower reaction times than neutral or positive pictures in tasks that require semantic processing, such as natural or man-made judgments about drawings of objects, commonness judgments about objects, and categorical judgments about pairs of words. In contrast, negative picture presentation did not slow down judgments in subsequent perceptual processing (e.g., color judgments about words, size judgments about objects). The subjective arousal level of negative pictures did not modulate the interference effects on semantic or perceptual processing. These findings indicate that encountering negative emotional events interferes with semantic processing of subsequent stimuli more strongly than perceptual processing, and that not all types of subsequent cognitive processing are impaired by negative events.

Figure 1

An example of the trial sequence in the naturalness task condition of Study 1.

Figure 2

Effects of emotional modulator pictures on reaction times in the three task conditions in Study 1. Brief presentation of negative pictures produced slower reaction times in two tasks that required semantic knowledge (i.e., natural-man made judgments about objects and commonness judgments about objects), but not in a perceptual task (size judgment about the object). Error bars represent standard errors.

Figure 3

Participants’ recognition memory for emotional modulator pictures in Study 1, expressed as their hit rate for old pictures (on the left) and their hit rate minus their false alarm rate (on the right). The error bars represent standard errors.

Figure 4

Example stimuli from Studies 2 and 3. Two words were printed in multiple colors. On half of the trials, the first letters of the two letters of two words were printed in the same color, while on the other trials, they were printed in different colors. To print the words, we employed six distinctive colors in Study 2, and six similar, but slightly different shades of blue in Study 3.

Figure 5

Effects of emotional modulator pictures on reaction times in the categorical task (i.e., semantic task) and the color task (i.e., perceptual task) in Study 2. Brief presentation of negative modulator pictures produced slower reaction times in the semantic task but not in the perceptual task. Error bars represent standard errors.

Figure 6

Effects of emotional modulator pictures on reaction times in the categorical task (i.e., semantic task) and the color task (i.e., perceptual task) in Study 3. Viewing negative modulator pictures produced slower reaction times in the semantic task but not in the perceptual task even when the perceptual task was more difficult than the semantic task. Error bars represent standard errors.