Effects of integration of facial expression and emotional voice on inhibition of return

Both inhibition of return (IOR) and emotion have the characteristics of attentional bias and improving search efficiency. Previous studies mostly used a single modality presentation of emotional stimuli to investigate the relationship between the two, but the findings are inconsistent. Existing studies have shown that the congruent emotion of audiovisual dual modality can be integrated into the perceptual stage, which is the same as the processing stage of IOR. Therefore, the present study adopted the cue-target paradigm and used audiovisual dual modality to present emotional stimuli to further investigate the interaction between emotion and IOR. Experiment 1 was a three-factor within-subject design. We manipulated the presentation of cue validity (cued vs. uncued), target modalities (visual vs. audiovisual), and emotion type (negative vs. neutral). The task of the subjects was to identify the emotional stimuli of visual modality. Experiment 2 was similar to Experiment 1, but the emotional congruency was changed. The audiovisual dual modality presented incongruent emotional stimuli (visual negative face-auditory neutral sound; visual neutral face-auditory negative sound) to further investigate whether the impact of the audiovisual dual modality emotional stimulus on IOR was caused by the emotional stimulus of the auditory modality, that is, whether the emotional stimulus of the auditory modality was processed. In Experiment 1, the responses in the cued condition were slower than those in the uncued condition, which suggested that IOR occurred. More importantly, the interaction between emotion type and cue validity in the audiovisual dual modality condition showed that congruent negative emotion produces a smaller IOR effect (11 ms) than neutral emotion (25 ins). At the same time, the audiovisual dual modality condition produced a smaller IOR effect (18 ms) than the visual single modality condition (40 ms). We also found a larger multisensory response enhancement effect in the congruent negative emotion than in the neutral emotion. In Experiment 2, the results showed that there was no interaction between emotion and IOR under the condition of audiovisual dual modality, and there was no significant difference in IOR effect between single modality and audiovisual dual modality. This indicated that the IOR effect was not influenced by the presence of incongruent emotion in the audiovisual dual modality. In summary, the present study showed that the IOR effect was influenced only when the audiovisual dual modality presented the same emotion. Our findings revealed that IOR and audiovisual dual modality congruent emotion in the same processing stage had a mutual influence. Audiovisual dual modality congruent emotion weakened the IOR effect, and the differences between the negative emotion and the neutral emotion showed the adaptability of IOR. At the same time, this study further supports the perceptual inhibition theory of IOR.