A ERP Study Of The Process From Core Affect To Discrete Emotion

Although psychologists can’t define emotion consistently, psychologists agree that emotion experience is the vital part of emotion. In the field of emotion experience, the debate between discrete emotion theory and dimensional emotion theory has last more than one century. Barrett thinks that there is not necessarily a gap between discrete emotion theory and dimensional emotional theory. And when Luo Yuejia selected pictures for CAPS, he found that pictures based on dimensions can be converged into several categories. This suggests there is a possibility that discrete emotion theory can be compared with dimensional emotion theory. Psychologists holding dimensional emotion theory agree that discrete emotions share some more basic components. Russell used "core affect" to label these components. Russell and Barrett proposed an emotion model. In the emotion model, when an individual categorizes the core affect, a kind of discrete emotion begins.Purpose:Despite that the existence of core affect has been demonstrated, the process of core affect to discrete emotion remains unknown. In order to probe into the process, this research adopts the event-related potential technique which is of high time definition. In Experiment1, the paper compared the ERP wave difference between core affect and discrete emotion. In experience2, the paper compared ERP wave difference of different positive emotion (joy\surprise), or different negative emotion(sad\fear) to demonstrate the overlapping part in the process.Process and methods:In this experiment, the paper used picture perceiving paradigm and selected four kinds of emotion stimuli. They are happy, sad, surprise and fear respectively. All of these pictures stem form CAPS, and they are rated again by thirteen postgraduates majored in psychology.Result:The difference between the state of core affect and discrete emotion for four emotion stimuli is prominent, which is represented on the LPP. Moreover, the difference between the state of core affect for happy and surprise is smaller than sad and fear. What’s more important, when I compared different positive emotion(happy/surprise) and different negative emotions (sad\fear), I found that in the window of200-400ms, the effect of stimuli was not prominent, but the effect of position effect was very prominent. There was a possibility that the processes of different positive emotions (or different negative emotions) overlapped. And when they are on the process of core affect, they overlapped.