Vinson, D. 1 , Anderson, A. 1 , Ratoff, W. 1 , Bahrami, B. 2, 3 & Vigliocco, G. 1
1 Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department. University College London. London, United Kingdom.
2 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. University College London. London, United Kingdom.
3 Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Linguistics. Aarhus University and Centre of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience. Aarhus, Denmark
The involvement of emotion in lexical processing has gained a great deal of attention, with many studies showing differential processing of words with negative emotional content. It is unknown, however, whether these effects of emotion are restricted to conscious perception, or extend to preconscious processing as well. In the present study we examine the role of emotional content on preconscious face and word processing, taking advantage of interocular suppression to render a stimulus invisible for a short duration, and using an orthogonal spatial task (location discrimination) to identify the time at which a stimulus emerges from visual suppression. Consistent patterns were observed for emotional content across modality: negative stimuli (angry faces and negative words) took longer to emerge than positively valenced (happy faces and positive words) or neutral stimuli (neutral faces and words). The direction of this effect is, however, in contrast to previous studies in which negative stimuli show an advantage, rather than a disadvantage as we observe here. We discuss how differences in task demands can produce apparently incompatible patterns of results, and show how these different results can be reconciled within attentional accounts of negativity bias.