Auditory emotional cues enhance visual perception

The (Non)Automaticity of Amygdala Responses to Threat: On the Issue of Fast Signals and Slow Measures

“…In contrast to the results of MothesLasch et al (2011), however, other recent studies have found cross-modal effects of emotional stimuli, demonstrating that emotional auditory information can facilitate identification of visual targets (Zeelenberg and Bocanegra, 2010) and boost early brain responses toward visual targets (Brosch et al, 2009) when participants' attention was directed toward the visual modality. In addition, visual emotional information has been shown to reduce resource allocation to an auditory startle probe, as indicated by a decreased amplitude of the attention-sensitive P3 component of the electroencephalogram (Keil et al, 2007).…”

Emotionally negative pictures increase attention to a subsequent auditory stimulus

“…Previous work in this area has shown that emotional stimuli will prime subsequent responses in a different sensory modality since stimuli in the same sensory modality are competing for limited processing resources (reviewed in Schupp et al, 2006). For example, cross modal studies show that emotional stimuli facilitate lexical decisions (Kissler and Koessler, 2011; but see Ihssen et al, 2007), enhance free recall (Herbert and Kissler, 2010), reduce response times (Scott et al, 2009;De Houwer et al, 2002;Jiang et al, 2007), improve identification of visual targets (Brosch et al, 2007(Brosch et al, , 2008Zeelenberg and Bocanegra, 2010; but see Weinberg and Hajcak, 2011), potentiate startle responses (Herbert and Kissler, 2010;reviewed in Lang et al, 1997b), augment the P1 ERP component during visual target detection (Brosch et al, 2009), and enhance touch sensation (Poliakoff et al, 2007). The motivational priming hypothesis expounded by Lang et al (1997b) particularly posits that priming will occur when there is a link or association with the emotional activation network.…”

Negative Arousal Increases the Effects of Stimulus Salience in Older Adults

“…Once an emotional stimulus is presented, it changes the way subsequently presented neutral objects compete for attention. For example, the ability to detect a solitary neutral stimulus can be enhanced by presenting an emotionally arousing stimulus just beforehand (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009; Padmala & Pessoa, 2008; Zeelenberg & Bocanegra, 2010), at least if the stimulus has low spatial frequency (Lee, Baek, Lu, & Mather, in press). Moreover, the presentation of an emotional stimulus has also been shown to enhance the ability to identify a neutral target within an array of neutral distracters (Becker, 2009; Olatunji, Ciesielski, Armstrong, & Zald, 2011; Phelps, Ling, & Carrasco, 2006).…”