Impacts of Emotional Ambient Sounds on Face Detection Sensitivity

Abstract

Emotion affects human activities in our everyday lives. Therefore, it is quite normal to expect that emotion can act on our common human–computer interaction behaviors. In the present study, ambient sounds or pictures were provided to create emotional contexts and examine their influences on the initial stage of information processing—information detection. Three traditional cognitive experiments were conducted to test whether emotional information can exert influences on detection performances for briefly presented faces. The results showed that fear ambient sounds could enhance detection sensitivity for neutral faces but not fear faces. Moreover, such modulation existed only when human voices were applied. When music or pictures with fear expressions were presented, no enhancement in face detection performances was found. The findings suggest that emotional contexts affecting visual detection largely depend on the valence and presentation forms of emotion information.