a School of Psychology , Victoria University of Wellington , Wellington , New Zealand.
Laterality. 2012;17(1):78-97. doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2010.532802. Epub 2011 Jun 27.
Emotional manipulations have been demonstrated to produce leftward shifts in perceptual asymmetries. However, much of this research has used linguistic tasks to assess perceptual asymmetry and there are therefore two interpretations of the leftward shift. It may reflect a leftward shift in the spatial distribution of attention as a consequence of emotional activation of the right hemisphere; alternatively it may reflect emotional facilitation of right hemisphere linguistic processing. The current study used two non-linguistic attention tasks to determine whether emotional prosody influences the spatial distribution of visual attention. In a dual-task paradigm participants listened to semantically neutral sentences in neutral, happy or sad prosodies while completing a target discrimination task (Experiment 1) and a target detection task (Experiments 2 and 3). There was only one condition in one experiment that induced perceptual asymmetries that interacted with emotional prosody, suggesting that task-irrelevant emotional prosody only rarely directs attention. Instead a more likely cause of the leftward perceptual shift for comprehension of emotional speech is facilitation of right hemisphere linguistic processing.
情绪操控已被证明会导致感知不对称向左移位。然而，这项研究大多使用语言任务来评估感知不对称，因此，向左移位有两种解释。它可能反映了右半球情绪激活导致的注意力空间分布向左移位；或者它可能反映了右半球语言处理的情绪促进。本研究使用了两个非语言注意力任务来确定情绪韵律是否会影响视觉注意力的空间分布。在双重任务范式中，参与者在中性、快乐或悲伤韵律下听语义中立的句子，同时完成目标辨别任务（实验 1）和目标检测任务（实验 2 和 3）。只有一个实验的一个条件会引起与情绪韵律相互作用的感知不对称，这表明任务不相关的情绪韵律很少会引导注意力。相反，情绪言语理解中出现的左移感知可能是右半球语言处理的促进。
