Figure 2. Effect of auditory negative words on response time in healthy subjects and patients with schizophrenia.

Response times for Negative-Neutral, Neutral-Negative stimuli on the right-left side were significantly longer than that for Neutral-Neutral word pairs, irrespective of direction of attention in the healthy controls (p = 0.0035, p = 0.025, respectively). In contrast, response time for Positive-Neutral (p = 0.11), Neutral-Positive (p = 0.12) word pairs on the right-left side was not significantly longer than that for Neutral-Neutral word pairs.