The Effect And Its Neural Mechanism Of The Emotion And Self-relevance On Episodic Future Thinking

Emotion plays a significant role for organizing information in the cognitive system of which episodic future thinking(EFT) is an important aspect. It is widely accepted that EFT is the ability to project oneself into the future to pre-experience an event.Future thinking is related to self, and the exploration of the emotion, self-relevance and EFT may play significant role in the emotional regulation, future plan and mental well-being and so on.Nowadays, researches at home and broad mainly focus on the phenomenal characteristic of EFT, but studies about the relation between emotion and EFT are little.There are several researches related to this subject, some pay more attention to the effect of future imagination on emotional events’ occurrence, not exploring the role of emotion in the EFT. Some mainly focus on imaging emotional events, followed by the rating of phenomenal characteristic of EFT such as vividness. The effect of emotion isn’t reflected because of not to manipulate the emotional valence. Some refer to the emotion induced by movie flips, but the external emotion is mixed with internal emotion provided by the events’ cues. So the experimental design needs to be improved.Other researches employ the view angle to explore the degree of self-relevance, not to aim to the influence of self-irrelevance on the EFT. And there are little studies on theeffect of emotion and self-relevance on EFT, not alone the neural mechanism on this effect.So, our aim is to explore two questions--the effect of the emotion on EFT under the different levels of self-relevance; the neural mechanism of effect of the emotion and self-relevance on EFT--by adopting behavior experiment and fMRI.Study 1 operating emotion and self-relevance explored how the effect worked.Especially, the process included the presentation of pictures to induce the different emotion and followed by cue phrase(through instruction providing the self-relevant and self-irrelevant conditions); finally, the participants would be asked to finish the task.Through the repeated measure ANOVA analysis, the result showed that the main effect of emotion was significant respectively in phenomenal characteristics such as Valence,Arousal and Importance. In addition, the main effect of self-relevance was significant respectively in phenomenal characteristics such as Valence, Arousal, details and both of them showed that average score of self-relevance was significantly higher than self-irrelevant condition. But there is no main effect in Importance. The interaction between emotion and self-relevance was significant in both Arousal and Importance,especially, there is no interaction in Valence. In order to further study the effect, we explored the second study.Study 2 using fMRI measures and improving experimental procedure which is based on the study 1 explored the neural mechanism of the effect of the emotion and self-relevance on the EFT. The behavioral results partly duplicated the former study.And the difference existed in the significant interaction between emotion and self-relevance in Valence, neither in Arousal nor Importance. The result mainly showed that that brain areas of interaction between emotion and self-relevance focused on Occipital lobe region(i.e., Cuneus, Lingual Gyrus, Calcarine cortex etc.), Parietal lobe region involved in Precuneus and Paracentral Lobule, prefrontal cortex including Middle Frontal Gyrus, Superior Frontal Gyrus and Medial Frontal Gyrus, and limbic system including Hippocampus, Parahippocampa Gyrus, Anterior Cingulate cortex(ACC) and Posterior Cingulate cortex(PCC), which were mainly comprised of the default network. Further, on the self-relevant condition, the right Middle cingulate and Precuneus negatively activated significantly when the emotional conditions(positive or negative) were compared with neutral condition. On the self-irrelevant condition, the left Superior Frontal Gyrus was activated in different conditions. This showed that the activated brain areas are different depending on the different conditions.Overall, it is concluded that(1) the main effect of emotion was significant respectively in phenomenal characteristics such as Valence, Arousal and Importance rather than details. Especially, compared with the negative emotion, people are prone to simulate the higher positive, more arousal and more important future events under the other two conditions. Rather, the details under the different emotions are more or less similar.(2) The main effect of self-relevance was significant respectively in the four phenomenal characteristics. In general, people is easier to evaluate it that the future events is more positive, higher arousal, more details and more importance.(3) The interaction between emotion and self-relevance was merely significant in Valence. In general, on the self-irrelevant condition, the average score of valence is significantly higher in positive and neutral conditions than the negative conditions; on the self-relevant condition, compared with the emotional conditions, the future events are more positive under the neutral condition.(4) Brain areas of interaction between emotion and self-relevance focused on Occipital lobe region(i.e., Cuneus, Lingual Gyrus,Calcarine cortex etc.), Parietal lobe region involved in Precuneus and Paracentral Lobule, prefrontal cortex including Middle Frontal Gyrus, Superior Frontal Gyrus and Medial Frontal Gyrus, and limbic system including Hippocampus, Parahippocampa Gyrus, Anterior Cingulate cortex(ACC) and Posterior Cingulate cortex(PCC), which mainly overlappped the default network.