Feeling Good, Hearing Wrong? Mood-Condition Differences in False Hearing and Metacognitive Evaluation in Speech-in-Noise Perception.

PURPOSE: False hearing occurs when listeners report perceiving a contextually appropriate word that differs from the one actually presented. This study examined whether false hearing and listeners' metacognitive sensitivity differed between positive- and negative-mood conditions.

METHOD: Seventy-eight female adults with normal hearing were assigned to either a positive- or negative-mood induction condition. All participants listened to 162 sentences with noise-masked final words: 40 semantically congruent targets (e.g., camera), 82 phonological lures (e.g., camel), and 40 semantically unrelated words (e.g., border). After each trial, participants selected the word they heard and rated their confidence. False hearing was defined as selecting the contextually expected target on lure trials.

RESULTS

Mood-condition differences depended on final-word type. Correct identification of phonological lures and unrelated words was higher in the negative-mood condition than in the positive-mood condition, whereas false-hearing responses were more frequent in the positive-mood condition than in the negative-mood condition. For congruent targets, the confidence-accuracy association was stronger in the negative-mood condition than in the positive-mood condition.

CONCLUSIONS

Compared with the negative-mood condition, the positive-mood condition was associated with more false-hearing responses and weaker confidence-accuracy correspondence for congruent targets. These findings suggest that an induced affective state may shape both perceptual decisions and metacognitive monitoring in adverse listening conditions. Nonetheless, these findings may reflect relative differences between the two induction conditions and thus should not be interpreted as isolated effects of positive or negative mood.