Abstract: Safety sign is used to transfer potential risk information and it plays an important role in safety management. The effective warning signs could help to alert people’s attentions to a potentially dangerous target. Warning signal words that help attract attention are widely used in safety signs. Previous studies indicated that people’s attention changed with different signal words.15 commonly used warning signal words were divided into three hazard levels (high/medium/low) according to the arousal strength of the words. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the hazard level of warning signal word on the attention effect of subsequent targets. Twenty-six (13 females) right handed undergraduates or graduates from University voluntarily participated in this experiment. This paper applied the classical cue-target paradigm in the experiment. During the experiment, subjects were comfortably seated in a sound-attenuated room with a keypad fixed to a chair arm for them to make responses. There were 8 blocks and each block consisted of 30 trials. Each trial began with a fixation cross that was appeared in the center with one rectangular box on the left side and one on the right side. Then, a warning signal word as a cue was presented in either of the boxes. After cue offset, two dots as targets were presented in either of the boxes. The subject was asked to judge the arrangement (vertically or horizontally) of the dots appeared in the target pictures. At the end of the experiment, a questionnaire would be finished by the subjects to score the emotional valence of the warning signal words. This study demonstrated that (a) The significant inhibition of return (IOR) effect of attention was found in this experiment. The response time of valid trials (cue and target appear on the same side) was longer than the invalid ones (cue and target appear on different sides) ;( b) The IOR effect of attention was modulated by the hazard level (high/medium/low) of warning signal words. Concretely speaking, high- hazard words compared to medium- and low-hazard words significantly reduced the IOR effect; (c) The modulation of words’ hazard levels on the IOR effect was limited on the whole. We found that the modulation effect was significant when the targets appeared on the left, but not significant when appearing on the right side. Concretely speaking, the high-hazard words diminished the IOR effect when the targets were on the left side. Why did the words modulate the IOR effect only when the targets appeared on the left side? Our study inferred that it was due to the lateralization of brain for processing negative emotional stimuli. Thus, we suggested that the effectiveness of the warning signal words was influenced by negative emotions related to the hazard levels. Our results are consistent with previous risk information processing model of warning signs, and provide behavioral experiment evidence for previous questionnaire study. Our study made two innovations. Firstly, we investigated the effectiveness of the warning signal words from a new perspective that how the words influenced the attention effect of the potentially dangerous targets. This was different from previous warning studies which mainly focused on the characteristic of warning itself. Secondly, this study found the modulation effect of hazard level of warning signal words on the IOR effect of the subsequent target. The high-hazard words could help to reduce the IOR effect. Moreover, this modulation effect showed a left lateralization during to the negative emotion closed related to the hazard level of the warning signal words. However, our experiment was just an exploratory. Further research studying the influence of hazard levels on the effectiveness of warning signal words was needed.

Key words: Warning signal word, Hazard level, Attention effect, Negative lateralization

摘要： 安全标志是一种传递潜在风险的方式，在安全管理中有重要地位。安全标志词语在安全标志中应用广泛。本文从新的视角研究安全标志词语的有效性，应用心理学中的线索-靶范式研究安全标志词语的风险等级对目标的注意效应的影响。实验结果发现，词语的风险等级显著调节注意返回抑制（inhibition of return, IOR）效应, 高风险词语相对于中、低风险词语能够减弱IOR效应;但词语的风险等级对IOR的调节作用受到靶子位置的影响，其中，靶子出现在左侧时调节作用显著，而靶子出现在右侧时调节作用不显著，这是由于风险引发的负性情绪刺激处理的偏侧优势产生的。本文为安全标志有效性相关研究提供了新的研究视角和心理学实验证据。

关键词: 安全标志词语, 风险等级, 注意效应, 负性偏侧优势