What makes a tumour worse: Taboo context affects how emotional distractors influence picture naming

Strong emotional words tend to command attention and disrupt cognitive processing. Three experiments investigated whether taboo context, defined by the inclusion of taboo distractors in a picture-word interference task, influences how a distractor’s emotional properties affect speech production. Participants named target pictures accompanied by written distractors varying in arousal and valence. Trials were presented in blocks with negative, positive, and neutral distractors that also included or omitted taboo distractors. Results showed that positive distractors had no significant effect on naming times, whereas negative distractors slowed picture naming only when they were higher in arousal and only in a taboo block. Naming times were slower overall in the taboo context compared to the non-taboo context. These findings suggest that the presence of taboo words changes the influence of non-taboo emotional words during speech production, which has implications for the role of attention in speech production theories and more broadly for cognition.