Recently, researchers have expanded the investigation into attentional biases toward positive stimuli; however, few studies have examined attentional biases toward positive auditory information. In three experiments, the present study employed an emotional spatial cueing task using emotional sounds as cues and auditory stimuli or visual stimuli as targets to explore whether auditory or visual spatial attention could be modulated by positive auditory cues. Experiment 3 also examined the temporal dynamics of cross-modal auditory bias toward positive natural sounds using event-related potentials. (...) The behavioral results of the three experiments consistently demonstrated that response times to targets were faster after positive auditory cues than they were after neutral auditory cues in the valid condition, indicating that healthy participants showed a selective auditory attentional bias and cross-modal attentional bias toward positive natural sounds. The results of Experiment 3 showed that N1 amplitudes were more negative after positive sounds than they were after neutral sounds, which further provided electrophysiological evidence that positive auditory information enhances attention at early stages in healthy adults. The results of the experiments performed in the present study suggest that humans exhibit an attentional bias toward positive natural sounds. (shrink)

The current study investigated how sad expressions during encoding affected recognition of facial identity in visual working memory and its electrophysiological correlates. Event-related poten...

Affective aspects of a stimulus can be processed rapidly and before cognitive attribution, acting much earlier for verbal stimuli than previously considered. Aimed for specific mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), expressed in facial expressions or word meaning and evoked by six basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, and surprise – relative to emotionally neutral stimuli were analysed in a sample of 116 participants. Brain responses in the occipital and left temporal regions elicited by the sadness in facial expressions (...) or words were indistinguishable from responses evoked by neutral faces or words. Confirming previous findings, facial fear elicited an early and strong posterior negativity. Instead of expected parietal positivity, both the happy faces and words produced significantly more negative responses compared to neutral. Surprise in facial expressions and words elicited a strong early response in the left temporal cortex, which could be a signature of appraisal. The results of this study are consistent with the view that both types of affective stimuli, facial emotions and word meaning, set off rapid processing and responses occur very early in the processing stage. (shrink)