Behavioural Inhibition Effects on Responses to Threatening Speech: Differences Between Semantics and Prosody

The present study investigates how trait anxiety affects speech processing, and whether anxiety has different processing consequences depending on speech informational properties. Participants listened to sentences in a go/no-go task where they were asked to respond to threat, which could be present in semantics, prosody, both or neither. In one experiment they were asked to attend to prosody only and ignore semantics, and in the other, attend to semantics and ignore prosody. Two additional experiments were conducted as controls, where participants responded to neutral, rather than threatening stimuli. Trait anxiety was measured psychometrically using a behavioural inhibition system scale (BIS). Results indicate that responses to threatening prosody become slightly slower and less accurate as BIS increases, while responses to threatening semantics become faster and more accurate as BIS increases. In the control experiments, responses to neutral prosody become faster and more accurate as BIS increases, but responses to neutral semantics just become less accurate as a function of BIS. We discuss these findings in terms of a combination of over-engagement with threat, threat avoidance and over-attention to threat, highlighting the need to consider that different aspects of a single stimulus may have very different consequences for anxious information processing.