Emotional context enhances auditory novelty processing: behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

Abstract Viewing emotionally negative pictures has been proposed to attenuate brain responses towards sudden auditory events, as more attentional resources are allocated to the affective visual stimuli. However, peripheral reflexes have been shown intensified. These observations have raised the question of whether an emotional context actually facilitates or attenuates processing in the auditory novelty system. Using scalp event‐related potentials we measured brain responses induced by novel sounds when participants responded to visual stimuli displaying either threatening or neutral sceneries. We then tested the modulatory effect of the emotional task conditions on auditory responses. Novel sounds yielded a stronger behavioural disruption on subjects’ visual task performance when responding to negative pictures compared with when responding to the neutral ones. Accordingly, very early novelty‐P3 responses to novel sounds were enhanced in negative context. These results provide strong evidence that the emotional context enhances the activation of neural networks in the auditory novelty system, gating acoustic novelty processing under potentially threatening conditions.