Laterality effects in cross-modal affective priming

The present study pursued M. P. Bryden's legacy by investigating how contextual factors can affect laterality effects. Specifically, a cross-modal affective priming paradigm was used in two experiments to determine whether priming with facial expressions would affect responses to emotional sounds. Experiment 1 established that cross-modal priming could be obtained when presenting the emotional sounds binaurally by showing more accurate responses when prime and target were congruent than when they were incongruent, although this extended to response time only for the happy emotion. This priming effect justified Experiment 2, in which the priming paradigm was integrated into a dichotic listening task. The central finding of Experiment 2 was a congruency by ear interaction on number of correct reports, showing that presentation of a facial emotion congruent with a left target produced a large left ear advantage that was reduced when a right ear congruent prime or an incongruent pairing was used. Implications of these findings for emotion processing in the context of Bryden's legacy are discussed.