Pop-Out Effect of Negative Words in a Word-Grid-Task

The environment is very complex, as there are many different stimuli that evoke attention, and therefore demands different adaptive reactions. Quick responses to upcoming danger are essential for survival. Highly negative stimuli contain alarm signals that cause an attentional shift toward the stimulus.

Past research indicates that high arousal negative words lead to faster reaction times in a Lexical Decision Task. This study tested whether these words can be found faster in a word grid task. Therefore we tested 56 participants who had to find words seen before within a word grid task. Our results show that participants found high arousal negative words faster than high arousal positive or neutral words. This might suggest a pop-out effect for the high arousal negative words within the word grid.