Effect of Affective Vocal Instructions on Task Performance

Affective prosody, which conveys emotions such as anger and happiness through vocal tone, plays a significant role in communication and verbal instructions. While emotional stimuli are known to capture attention, the influence of affective vocal instructions on task performance remains underexplored. This study investigated the effects of affective prosody on response time (RT) and accuracy during a manual joystick movement task. Forty-five Latvian-speaking participants responded to vocal instructions indicating spatial directions (up, down, left, right) spoken in angry, happy, or neutral tones. To assess repeated exposure to emotional prosody, affective instructions were presented in angry and happy blocks, followed by neutral trials. Response times were adjusted to the first meaningful segment of vocal instructions to control for physical differences in stimuli.The results revealed that angry prosody elicited faster RTs compared to neutral and happy instructions, though no significant differences in accuracy were observed, likely due to a ceiling effect caused by the task's low cognitive demands. In contrast, happy prosody did not significantly influence task performance relative to neutral prosody. These findings align with the negativity bias framework, which suggests that negative stimuli, such as angry prosody, capture attention more effectively due to evolutionary importance in signaling potential threats and ensuring survival.Moreover, the effect of angry prosody on RT persisted into subsequent neutral trials. This highlights the lasting influence of affective prosody on performance. The findings emphasize the need for further research on emotional prosody in educational contexts, where both immediate and lasting effects can shape task performance.Keywords: affective prosody, emotions, vocal instructions, negativity bias, task performance