Crossmodal Negativity Bias in Semantic Processing

Negative events have greater influence on cognitive processing compared with positive events, a phenomenon referred to as the negativity bias. Previous studies have shown that reaction times (RTs) to negatively valenced items are slower in semantic tasks. According to the automatic vigilance hypothesis, these effects are caused by preferential attention to negative stimuli or features diverting cognitive resources away from semantic processing. However, it is still unclear whether the negativity bias can be modulated by affective context in a crossmodal setting and how that occurs. Experiment 1 examined individually presented pictures and words and established that participants were slower to judge negatively valenced picture and word targets in a semantic task. Experiments 2 and 3 probed the crossmodal influences of valence on subsequent semantic processing by using short music clips as primes and valenced pictures or words as targets. Both experiments demonstrated that priming negative versus positive music slowed RTs in a semantic task, irrespective of target valence. Hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion model analyses suggest that the slow-down effects for negative conditions are mainly attributed to reduced drift rates. Together, these experiments demonstrate that negative auditory valence can impair subsequent semantic processing of visual targets in an additive fashion. These results provide further support for the automatic vigilance hypothesis.