Partial habituation to disruption by irrelevant emotive speech – evidence for duplex-mechanism account

Zhang, Qiyuan, Williams, Craig and Morgan, Phillip L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5672-0758 2024. Partial habituation to disruption by irrelevant emotive speech – evidence for duplex-mechanism account. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 36 (1) , pp. 42-60. 10.1080/20445911.2024.2310881 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Evidence shows that the degrading effect of irrelevant background speech on short-term memory task performance is modulated by its emotional valence, pointing to an attention-driven process as its underlying mechanism. Within the current experiments, habituation to emotive background speech is investigated with findings indicating that attentional capture cannot fully account for disruptive effects. First, negative and positive background speech were in general more disruptive than neutral speech. Second, repeated exposure to negative speech resulted in improvement of serial recall performance, but only to the point where the disruptiveness was similar to that of neutral speech. Third, participants displayed no habituation to neutral speech. Together, these findings support the duplex-mechanism account of the irrelevant sound effect and reveal two components of the disruption caused by emotive speech: a valence component driven by attentional shift, and, an acoustic component explicable by interference-by-process. Practical implications for emotionally charged workplace settings are discussed.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	2044-5911
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 January 2024
Date of Acceptance:	20 December 2023
Last Modified:	03 May 2024 16:34
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165552

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