Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cultural background may shape how people attend to different emotional cues. Emotions can be perceived from both visual and auditory channels. This cross-cultural study investigated individuals’ attention to emotional cues in facial expressions and spoken words. The final sample consisted of 99 Singaporean Chinese and 81 German adults (Mage = 24.03 years, SDage = 6.29 years). In this online study, participants completed two tasks in which they were presented with emotional facial expressions and spoken words simultaneously. They were asked to judge the pleasantness of word meanings (Word task) or facial expressions (Face task) while ignoring the other aspect. Singaporean participants’ accuracies were significantly influenced by the word content while judging the pleasantness of facial expressions in the Face task. However, for German participants, there was no significant interference effect in either the Face or Word task.