We tend to think that emotional words are more likely to grab our attention. It can seem impossible to ignore the insults shouted in a crowded room or the disturbing phrases heard on the television. However, a new study has been published psychological science This suggests that the opposite may occur before words reach consciousness.
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that when people are concentrating on a visual task, they are less likely to consciously notice negative spoken words than neutral ones. The findings provide new insights into how the brain decides what information enters consciousness and what information remains outside of consciousness.
“This study is a good example of how our conscious intuitions about what we notice are not always unconscious actions,” said lead author Gal R. Chen, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Although much of the brain’s processing occurs outside of consciousness, scientists know little about how the information that enters consciousness is selected, especially in the auditory sense. Insight into this process could explain how non-conscious information influences an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
Much of what scientists know about non-conscious processing comes from studies of vision in which researchers briefly flash images that participants cannot consciously report seeing. However, voice comes with other challenges. This is because audio, unlike images, cannot be transmitted instantly. So researchers have struggled to determine how much information the brain can process from spoken language before a person is aware of it.
Chen and his colleagues set out to investigate whether the emotional meaning of spoken words affects their chance of reaching consciousness when people are focused on another task.
In the study, 101 Hebrew-speaking adults were asked to identify whether a figurine on a screen was the same as the figurine in front of it while listening to a stream of meaningless pseudowords. In some cases, emotionally negative or emotionally neutral actual Hebrew words were inserted into the audio stream. After hearing the word, participants were asked whether they noticed it and completed an additional test designed to measure awareness.
“We initially thought that people would notice more negative things because it’s our conscious intuition,” Chen said. “There’s a lot of data showing that seeing or hearing negative things slows you down and makes more mistakes.”
Instead, the opposite happened. Participants were more likely to focus on neutral words than negative words.
“We thought it was a mistake,” Chen said. “So we repeated the study, adding new words, and found the same trend: people notice negative words less.”
The effect persisted even when the researchers repeated the experiment using the same visual task but with a larger set of words. To test whether this observation was specific to high-effort conditions, the researchers repeated the experiment, but this time they replaced the demanding visual task with a much easier task. Again, participants were more likely to notice neutral words than negative words.
According to the researchers, one possible explanation for this observation is that consciously experiencing negative information is costly, and the cognitive system sometimes chooses not to pay this cost.
“It may be an unconscious default to suppress information that might be harmful to us,” Chen says. “If your main job is to talk to me, random words that pop up won’t help you. And if these words slow you down, your default unconscious bias may be ‘don’t bring that word in.'”
The findings may provide new avenues for studying mental health conditions. Chen speculates that future research could investigate whether the same unconscious filtering processes work differently in people with anxiety disorders, phobias, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The average person is less likely to notice negative words than neutral words,” Chen said. “In clinical populations, this selection bias may not exist.”
“If you think of the unconscious as a gatekeeper that protects us from things that might harm us or influence our decisions, you might wonder what happens if this gatekeeper fails,” he added.
Chen noted that the study has limitations. For example, they tested single words rather than conversational or natural speech, and did not test highly positive or taboo words, which could yield different results. He said future research could investigate whether the same effect appears in texts, stories, and more realistic listening environments.
So far, he said, the findings suggest that the non-conscious may play a larger role in shaping our everyday experiences than we realize.
sauce:
Psychological Science Association
Reference magazines:
G. R. Chen, Z. Maswadeh, L. Deouell, and Hassin, R. R. (2026). The ability to consciously detect a spoken word depends on the valence of the word. psychological science. Doi: 10.1177/09567976261434113
