Emotion-modulated Recall: Congruency Effects of Nonverbal Facial and Vocal Cues on Semantic Recall

The current study had two main goals: First, to replicate the ‘bimodal integration’ effect (i.e. automatic integration of crossmodal stimuli, namely facial emotions and emotional prosody); second, investigate whether this phenomenon facilitates or impairs intake retention unattended verbal content. borrowed from previous bimodal designs included a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task, where subjects were instructed identify emotion face (as either ‘angry’ ‘happy’) while ignoring concurrently presented sentence (spoken in an angry, happy, neutral prosody), after which surprise recall was administered effects on semantic content retention. While replicated faster more accurate identification under congruent conditions), congruency not found for recall. Overall, better trials with (vs. neutral) faces, worse happy angry prosody. Taken together, our findings suggest that when individuals focus their attention evaluation expressions, they implicitly integrate nonverbal vocal cues hedonic valence tone accompanying sentences), devote less impairing prosody may indicate interference effect, research is required uncover potential prosody-specific effects. All supplemental online materials can be OSF (https://osf.io/am9p2/).