Phasic boosting of auditory perception by visual emotion

Abstract Emotionally negative stimuli boost perceptual processes. There is little known, however, about the timing of this modulation. The present study aims at elucidating the phasic effects of, emotional processing on auditory processing within subsequent time-windows of visual emotional, processing in humans. We recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants responded to a, discrimination task of faces with neutral or fearful expressions. A brief complex tone, which subjects, were instructed to ignore, was displayed concomitantly, but with different asynchronies respective to, the image onset. Analyses of the N1 auditory event-related potential (ERP) revealed enhanced brain, responses in presence of fearful faces. Importantly, this effect occurred at picture-tone asynchronies of, 100 and 150 ms, but not when these were displayed simultaneously, or at 50 ms or 200 ms asynchrony. These results confirm the existence of a fast-operating crossmodal effect of visual emotion on auditory, processing, suggesting a phasic variation according to the time-course of emotional processing.