Selective Habituation to Emotive Speech

Our research investigated the underlying mechanism of the degrading effect of irrelevant background speech on the performance of short-term memory (serial recall) task by examining the effect of emotional valence of speech on its disruptiveness and people's habituation process to emotive speech after repeated exposure. Our results show that participants only habituated to the semantic component of the emotive speech but not the acoustic component – a phenomenon we named selective habituation. The finding provide possible reconciliation to the mixed findings regarding habituation to irrelevant background sound in the research field and is in support of the duplex-mechanism account of the irrelevant background sound effect. It also has important practical implications due to the prevalence of emotive speech in workplaces. .