The effect of auditory valence on subsequent visual semantic processing.

Emotion influences many cognitive processes and plays an important role in our daily life. Previous studies focused on the effects of arousal on subsequent cognitive processing, but the effect of valence on subsequent semantic processing is still not clear. The present study examined the effect of auditory valence on subsequent visual semantic processing when controlling for arousal. We used instrumental music clips varying in valence while matching in arousal to induce valence states and asked participants to make natural or man-made judgements on subsequent neutral objects. We found that positive and negative valences similarly impaired subsequent semantic processing compared with neutral valence. The linear ballistic accumulator model analyses showed that the valence effects can be attributed to drift rate differences, suggesting that the effects are likely related to attentional selection. Our findings are consistent with a motivated attention model, indicating comparable attentional capture by both positive and negative valences in modulating subsequent cognitive processes.