Selective attention to emotional prosody in social anxiety: a dichotic listening study

ABSTRACT

The majority of evidence on social anxiety (SA)-linked attentional biases to threat comes from research using facial expressions. Emotions are, however, communicated through other channels, such as voice. Despite its importance in the interpretation of social cues, emotional prosody processing in SA has been barely explored. This study investigated whether SA is associated with enhanced processing of task-irrelevant angry prosody. Fifty-three participants with high and low SA performed a dichotic listening task in which pairs of male/female voices were presented, one to each ear, with either the same or different prosody (neutral or angry). Participants were instructed to focus on either the left or right ear and to identify the speaker’s gender in the attended side. Our main results show that, once attended, task-irrelevant angry prosody elicits greater interference than does neutral prosody. Surprisingly, high socially anxious participants were less prone to distraction from attended-angry (compared to attended-neutral) prosody than were low socially anxious individuals. These findings emphasise the importance of examining SA-related biases across modalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• dichotic listening task
• emotional prosody
• interference effects
• multimodality

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hannah Restle for her relevant comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper as well as Aurélie Meugens for her help in collecting the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Given the fact that HSA group showed higher scores than LSA group for BDI-II, an ANCOVA was conducted on both response accuracy and reaction times. Regarding response accuracy, the main effects of Attended-Emotion F(1, 50) = 17.95, p < .001, and of Gender-of-the-attended-prosody F(1, 50) = 17.88, p < .001, were significant. There were also several significant interactions: Attended-Emotion × Gender-of-the-attended-prosody F(1, 50) = 12.01, p = .001, , Unattended-Emotion × Gender-of-the-attended-prosody F(1, 50) = 5.97, p < .05, . In contrast to the ANOVA, several interactions failed to reach significant: Attended-Emotion × Unattended-Emotion F(1, 50) = 2.76, p = NS, Attended-Emotion × Unattended-Emotion × Gender-of-the-attended-prosody F(1, 50) = 2.46, p = NS and the Attended-Emotion × Unattended-Emotion × Gender-of-the-attended-prosody × Group F(1, 50) = 2.45, p = NS. There were no other significant main effects or interactions (Fs < .50). With respect to reaction times, the main effects of Attended-Emotion F(1, 50) = 16.47, p < .001, and of Gender-of-the-attended-prosody F(1, 50) = 11.84, p < .001, as well as the Attended-Emotion × Group interaction F(1, 50) = 4.50, p < .05, were found significant. Contrary to the ANOVA, the Attended-Emotion × Gender-of-the-attended-prosody interaction F(1, 50) = .21, p = NS and the Attended-Emotion × Unattended-Emotion × Gender-of-the-attended-prosody interaction F(1, 50) = .99, p = NS did not reach significance. Other main effects or interactions did not reach significance (Fs < 2)”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique – FNRS (Belgium) under Grant [2.4511.11].