A new study published in Psychological Science suggests that people are less likely to consciously notice emotionally negative spoken words than neutral ones when focused on a visual task, according to research conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and announced on June 12. The findings provide insight into how the brain determines which information enters conscious awareness and which remains outside it.
Lead author Gal R. Chen, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, "This study is a nice example of how our conscious intuitions regarding what we notice are not always what our unconscious is doing." The research aimed to understand how emotional meaning influences whether spoken words reach awareness during another demanding activity.
In the experiment, 101 Hebrew-speaking adults were asked to identify figurines on a screen while listening to streams of meaningless pseudowords interspersed with real Hebrew words—either emotionally negative or neutral. After each word, participants reported whether they noticed it and completed further tests measuring their awareness. Contrary to expectations that negative content would be more noticeable due to its emotional charge, participants were more likely to notice neutral words over negative ones.
"We assumed initially that people would notice the negative stuff more because that is our conscious intuition," Chen said. "There is a lot of data showing that when you see or hear something negative you slow down or make more mistakes." However, repeated experiments confirmed the trend: Neutral words were noticed more often than negative ones.
The researchers also tested whether this effect was specific to challenging tasks by repeating the experiment with an easier visual task; results remained consistent. Chen suggested one explanation: "It may be the default of the unconscious mind to suppress information that may be harmful to us... if these words slow you down, the default unconscious bias might be, 'don't bring them around.'"
Chen noted limitations in their study such as focusing only on single words rather than conversations and not testing highly positive or taboo terms. He speculated future research could explore these areas and investigate differences in clinical populations with anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder. "If you think of the unconscious as a gatekeeper guarding us against things that may harm us or influence our decisions, you might ask what happens if this gatekeeper screws up," he said.
