The Effect Of Different Emotional States On Conscious And Unconscious Conflict Adaptation

The traditional view is that cognitive control relies on consciousness.This is because the relevant brain area responsible for cognitive control,the prefrontal cortex,is also closely related to consciousness experience,and some people even recognize that control is equivalent to awareness.However,in recent years,studies have found that cognitive control functions such as conflict control,task switching,and error processing can also be triggered by unconscious information.However,whether the conflict adaptation that reflects the flexibility of cognitive processing also needs awareness does not come to an unanimous conclusion.Conflict adaptation means that after an individual has experienced a conflict,it will promote the subsequent resolution of the conflict,manifesting as a reduction of the congruency effect after the conflict trials.The predecessors usually use the partial contrast masking paradigm to study the adaptation effect of the unconscious conflict,but this paradigm manipulates the conscious and unconscious by changing the presentation time of prime,which inevitably introduces new variables,the different SOAs.In order to operate the unconscious more effectively.This study uses the masking Stroop priming paradigm to explore whether conflict adaptation is independent of consciousness.In addition,emotion is an important factor in the study of factors that influence the adaptive effect of conflict.Summing up previous studies found that the use of video clips,music imagination induced emotional state affect the conflict adaptation effect,manifested as negative emotion promotion and positive emotion hinder the conflict adaptation effect.But predecessors only examined sadness and anxiety.Since negative emotions also include anger,fear and disgust,and different negative emotions have different effects on cognition,memory and inhibition control.But,how the different negative emotions have an effect on conflict adaptation? Finally,it is still controversial whether unconscious conflict adaptation and conscious conflict adaptation are essentially the same.If the two are essentially the same,then the impact of emotional state on conflict adaptation can also be extended to unconscious conflict adaptation.In the first experiment,we used masked Stroop priming task to to investigate whether the unconscious conflict information could also trigger subsequent adjustments of control.It was found that after the conscious and unconscious conditions,the post-conflict adaptation phenomenon appeared,indicating that conflict adaptation is independent of consciousness.In experiment two,using the method of watching video clips induced the participants’ positive,neutral and negative emotional states to examine whether the emotional states affected the adaptation of unconscious conflicts.It was found that under the level of consciousness and unconsciousness,the influence of emotional states on conflict adaptation was consistent.That is,positive emotions inhibit conflict adaptation,and negative emotions enhance conflict adaptation.In Experiment 3,three emotional states of anger,fear and disgust were selected to examine the effects of different negative emotions on the adaptation of consciousness and unconscious conflict.It was found that the anger emotion group only found the conflict adaptation effect under the conscious level,while the fear and disgust emotion group had the conflict adaptation effect under both conscious and unconscious levels.Overall,this study confirms that unconscious conflicts can also trigger post-conflict adaptation effects,suggesting that conflict adaptation is independent of consciousness.Different emotional states have the same and different effects on the adaptation of conscious and unconscious conflicts.From the side,it shows that there are overlaps and differences in the adaptation of conscious conflicts and unconscious conflicts to internal mechanisms.