Chen Fei, Lian Jing, Zhang Gaode, Guo Chengyu
School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China.
Front Psychiatry. 2022 Jun 6;13:889476. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.889476. eCollection 2022.
This study explored the performance of Chinese college students with different severity of trait depression to process English emotional speech under a complete semantics-prosody Stroop effect paradigm in quiet and noisy conditions. A total of 24 college students with high-trait depression and 24 students with low-trait depression participated in this study. They were required to selectively attend to either the prosodic emotion (happy, sad) or semantic valence (positive and negative) of the English words they heard and then respond quickly. Both prosody task and semantic task were performed in quiet and noisy listening conditions. Results showed that the high-trait group reacted slower than the low-trait group in the prosody task due to their bluntness and insensitivity toward emotional processing. Besides, both groups reacted faster under the consistent situation, showing a clear congruency-induced facilitation effect and the wide existence of the Stroop effect in both tasks. Only the Stroop effect played a bigger role during emotional prosody identification in quiet condition, and the noise eliminated such an effect. For the sake of experimental design, both groups spent less time on the prosody task than the semantic task regardless of consistency in all listening conditions, indicating the friendliness of basic emotion identification and the difficulty for second language learners in face of semantic judgment. These findings suggest the unneglectable effects of college students' mood conditions and noise outside on emotion word processing.
本研究在完全语义-韵律斯特鲁普效应范式下，探究了不同特质抑郁严重程度的中国大学生在安静和嘈杂条件下处理英语情感语音的表现。共有24名高特质抑郁大学生和24名低特质抑郁大学生参与了本研究。他们被要求选择性地关注所听到英语单词的韵律情感（快乐、悲伤）或语义效价（积极和消极），然后迅速做出反应。韵律任务和语义任务均在安静和嘈杂的聆听条件下进行。结果表明，高特质组在韵律任务中的反应比低特质组慢，因为他们对情感处理迟钝且不敏感。此外，两组在一致情境下的反应都更快，在两项任务中均表现出明显的一致性诱导促进效应和斯特鲁普效应的广泛存在。只有在安静条件下的情感韵律识别过程中，斯特鲁普效应发挥了更大作用，而噪音消除了这种效应。出于实验设计的考虑，无论所有聆听条件下的一致性如何，两组在韵律任务上花费的时间都比语义任务少，这表明基本情感识别的友好性以及第二语言学习者面对语义判断时的困难。这些发现表明，大学生的情绪状况和外界噪音对情感词汇处理有着不可忽视的影响。
