What Emotion Catches Your Ear’s Attention? How anxiety affects what you hear

Deanna Sharpe – deanna.sharpe@alumni.emory.edu

Instagram: @deanna._.s
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 30058, United States

Mishaela DiNino
dinino@buffalo.edu
University at Buffalo

Popular version of 1pPP13 – Auditory Emotional Attention in Anxiety Disorders
Presented at the 190th ASA Meeting
Read the abstract at https://eppro01.ativ.me/web/page.php?page=IntHtml&project=ASASPRING2026&id=4082942

–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–

Imagine you’re eating with your friend, when you both suddenly get distracted by someone angrily arguing with their date. The conversation captured your attention due to its emotional content. This attention-grabbing experience of an angry conversation may intensify for those with anxiety disorders.

In hearing, auditory selective attention refers to the process of focusing on one sound while suppressing attention to other sounds. This is important for hearing speech in noise and focusing on conversations in social settings. Exploring how anxiety may affect auditory attention is critical to understanding how anxiety disorder symptoms affect everyday social situations.

Generalized anxiety disorders are characterized by excessive, clinically significant worry, whereas social anxiety disorders are marked by persistent fear or anxiety about social situations (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). People with anxiety disorders tend to have attention biases, especially in response to threat.

Illustration showing a listener receiving sound waves leading to either attended speaker interaction or emotionally charged, voice-driven attention.Figure 1. Visualization of Auditory Emotional Attention Process.

For example, research with visual stimuli, such as written words, demonstrates that individuals with anxiety exhibit an attention bias toward negative stimuli over neutral or positive stimuli (Fox, 1993; Yiend & Mathews, 2001). However, much less is known about a potential bias to sound in anxiety disorders. Negative emotion in speech can be conveyed through rhythm, stress, and intonation, otherwise known as prosody (Ladd, 2008). So, if individuals with anxiety disorders are biased toward negative sounds, like angry voices, that could interfere with auditory selective attention, making it difficult for them to follow conversations when others speak around them.

In this study, young adults listened to a target sentence while ignoring a second sentence played simultaneously. In the “Emotional Target” condition, the target sentence was spoken with emotional prosody (happy, sad, or angry-sounding), with a neutral (no prosody) distractor sentence. In the “Emotional Distractor” condition, the target was neutral, whereas the distractor was emotional. Additionally, participants completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7) (Spitzer et al., 2006) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) (Heimberg et al., 1992). We expected that individuals with greater symptom severity for generalized and social anxiety would have more difficulty attending to neutral speech while ignoring emotional speech.

Text block Figure 2. Auditory Emotional Attention Task Instructions.

Figure 3. Emotional Target Example.

Instead, our findings demonstrated that people with greater generalized anxiety disorder symptoms performed significantly better on both conditions of the task. Individuals with higher levels of social anxiety symptoms also demonstrated significantly better performance on the Emotional Target condition. While these results don’t align with our hypothesis, they are consistent with increased vigilance in anxiety disorders (Bögels & Mansell, 2004; Vassilopoulos, 2005).

Our study findings suggest that individuals with generalized anxiety and social anxiety disorders experience greater auditory salience to emotionally prosodic stimuli. This means they’re better able to both attend to and ignore emotional stimuli than are individuals without these disorders. Thus, further research on auditory emotional attention will help understand attentional bias and provide insight into the treatment of anxiety disorders.

But until then, the next time you’re in a noisy room, consider which sounds capture your attention!

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
Bögels, S. M., & Mansell, W. (2004). Attention processes in the maintenance and treatment of social phobia: Hypervigilance, avoidance and self-focused attention. Clinical Psychology Review, 24(7), 827–856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2004.06.005
Fox, E. (1993). Allocation of visual attention and anxiety. Cognition and Emotion, 7(2), 207–215.
Heimberg, R. G., Mueller, G. P., Holt, C. S., Hope, D. A., & Liebowitz, M. R. (1992). Assessment of anxiety in social interaction and being observed by others: The Social Interaction Anxiety Scale and the Social Phobia Scale. Behavior Therapy, 23(1), 53–73.
Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed). Cambridge university press.
Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: The GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097.
Vassilopoulos, S. P. (2005). Social anxiety and the vigilance-avoidance pattern of attentional processing. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 33(1), 13–24.
Yiend, J., & Mathews, A. (2001). Anxiety and attention to threatening pictures. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 54(3), 665–681.

Atom Tones – A periodic table of audible elements

Jill A. Linz – jlinz@skidmore.edu

Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866, United States

Christian Howat
Skidmore College, Class of 2022
815 N. Broadway
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

Popular version of 4aMU5-Atom Tones: investigating waveforms and spectra of atomic elements in an audible periodic chart using techniques found in music production, presented at the 183rd ASA Meeting.

atom tonesAtom Tones is an audible periodic table that allows us to identify elements through sound and to investigate the atomic world with methods used by sound engineers. The periodic table of Atom Tones can be accessed on the Atom Tones website. The Atom Music project was introduced in 2019 and explained the background ideas for creating audible tones for each atom. Each tone is clearly unique and can be used to identify the element by its sound. Audible tones can also be used in conjunction with the visual interpretations of the sound’s waveform to possibly gain insight into the atom.

In the same way that sunlight can be decomposed into individual colors of the rainbow, light produced from different elements can be decomposed into rainbow-like patterns that are unique to that element. The rainbow colors of the element appear as a series of bright lines known as spectral lines, or atomic spectra. Figure 1 shows examples of several element patterns, along with the element’s signature tone. The pattern of lines is unique to each atom.

Spectral lines produced by carbon. Image courtesy of Linz original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)
Spectral lines produced by Nitrogen. Image courtesy of Linz original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)
Spectral lines produced by Oxygen. Image courtesy of Linz original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)
Figure 1: Spectral lines produced by three different elements. These lines are unique for each element and are used to identify the element itself. The tones can be heard by clicking on each image. Image courtesy of Linz original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)

The relationship between music and physics is so intertwined that translating the spectral lines into sound is a relatively easy thing to do. Tedious perhaps, but not difficult. We can translate those colors into sounds of varying frequency, or pitch. These frequencies act like notes in a scale that can be played individually or combined. It is with these notes that we created the sounds of the elements.

A sound engineer can easily identify specific types of musical instruments as well as the musical intervals and chords played by those instruments by observing the digital waveforms and spectra produced in a recording, in addition to simply listening by ear. Digital audio software adds an extra layer of insight to the sound. Figure 2 shows the different waveforms and spectral lines for a French Horn and Bassoon each playing the same note, D3.

waveform and spectra of a French Horn compared to a Bassoon. Image courtesy of Linz original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)Figure 2: waveform and spectra of a French Horn compared to a Bassoon. Image courtesy of Linz original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)

Using the techniques developed for audio recording and music synthesis, we can create an audible representation of each element. Possible ways to interpret the tones produced are being investigated. Figure 3 shows the waveforms and spectra for a few elements that exhibit wave patterns that repeat themselves. This is what a sound engineer would expect to see when the recording sounds harmonic, or musical.

These are a few atom tones whose waveforms exhibited similar patterns that repeat themselves. Image courtesy of Linz, Howat original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)Figure 3: These are a few atom tones whose waveforms exhibited similar patterns that repeat themselves. Image courtesy of Linz, Howat original paper (Proceedings on Meetings in Acoustics)

Other combinations of elements exhibit very different patterns. The software allows you to zoom in and observe the pattern from different perspectives. Not only are we hearing the atoms for the first time, perhaps we are also seeing them in a new light.