Relationship Between Auditory Distraction and Emotional Dimensionality for Non-Speech Sounds.

The final rating sample was 19 adults, after 3 of 22 completers were removed for failing attention checks. The people who rated the sounds were not the same people who completed the word recognition task, so the emotion-distraction links depend on group-level averages rather than individual responses. Only adults with good self-reported hearing and no reported psychological disorders or psychotropic medication use were studied, so this does not show what happens for patients with hearing loss, children, or adults with other conditions. The rating task was completed online, and participants were asked in good faith to use a quiet environment, but the quiet environment was not verified. The distractors were very brief, 500 ms, and were normalized for loudness, which may not match real-world sounds. The word recognition effects were about 3 percentage points, and the authors state they are not likely clinically meaningful.

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Do not conclude that emotionally evocative sounds are clinically meaningful word-recognition problems. The word recognition differences were about 3 percentage points, and the authors state they are not likely clinically meaningful; the larger effect was slower response times.