title: Behold the voice of wrath: cross-modal modulation of visual attention by anger prosody.
abstract: Emotionally relevant stimuli are prioritized in human information processing. It has repeatedly been shown that selective spatial attention is modulated by the emotional content of a stimulus. Until now, studies investigating this phenomenon have only examined within-modality effects, most frequently using pictures of emotional stimuli to modulate visual attention. In this study, we used simultaneously presented utterances with emotional and neutral prosody as cues for a visually presented target in a cross-modal dot probe task. Response times towards targets were faster when they appeared at the location of the source of the emotional prosody. Our results show for the first time a cross-modal attentional modulation of visual attention by auditory affective prosody.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, 40, Bd. du Pont d'Arve, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland. Tobias.Brosch@pse.unige.ch
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Brosch
authors.forename: Didier
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Grandjean
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sander
authors.forename: Klaus R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Scherer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000786:Anger; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception