How does self name influence the neural processing of emotional prosody? An ERP study

In this study, we investigated whether self-relevant information can accelerate the processing of emotional information. Our experiment, based on a passive auditory oddball paradigm, involved recording electroencephalography while participants listened to stimuli comprising their own names (ONs) and unfamiliar names (UNs) spoken with varying emotional prosody. At 220-300 ms, mismatch negativity (MMN) was more negative for ONs and angry prosody than for UNs and neutral prosody, respectively. These results suggest that attention is involuntarily attracted by ONs and emotional prosody, and that both types of information are given priority processing, even under pre-attentive conditions. Importantly, ONs with angry prosody induced more negative MMN than did similar UNs and ONs with neutral prosody, which indicates that the motivational significance embedded in angry prosody promotes the self-reference effect and, thus, involves more attention resources. At 300-500 ms, ONs triggered smaller P3a than did UNs, suggesting that less cognitive resources are required to process self-relevant information. These results suggest that self-relevant and emotional information of preferential processing interact with each other during the pre-attentive stage, with self-reference enhancing the processing of emotional information.