| Objective This study was designed to investigate the performance and the developmental characteristics of susceptibility to emotion which serves to reflect the affection level of individual's emotions on their cognitions on different levels and dimensions, and to provide theoretical support for decision-making as well as educational science. Methods To do a series of experiments on emotional STROOP paradigm and affective priming paradigm with subjects of normal children at age of 5, 6, and 7, and adults, then to analyze the behavior and ERP index of the subjects. Results In the experiment under the condition of subliminal emotional STROOP, compared to the condition of neutral facial expression cards, it was found that 5-year-olds took longer time to identify colors after they were exposed to crying facial expressions, six-year-olds only make more mistakes in identifying the colors when they were shown smiling facial expression cards, 7-year-old only make more mistakes in identifying colors when they were shown cards with women's smiling faces, but adults did not make differences in performance between conditions. When the ERP of 5-year-olds and adults were examined as they were engaged in emotional STROOP task, it was found that among 5-year-olds, ERP index which serves to distinguish the emotion-facilitating group from emotion-interference group was seen, but no similar results were discovered among the adults. In the subliminal affective priming experiment, emotion-incongruent effects were found in 5-7 year-olds. This effect was found to increase gradually and to reach significant level in 7-year-olds.In adults, significant emotion-congruent effect was found. No prominent affective priming effect was found in the evaluation behaviors of 5-7 year-olds after comedy/tragedy movie episodes. When the 5-7 year-olds were required to act as referees for "animal leaping match", it was found only 5-year-olds had significant bias resulting from their favors to certain animals, and this bias decreased, and disappeared eventually, with the increase of ages. Conclusion The subjects'levels of cognitive processing quality (reaction speed and correction rate) which were affected by implicit emotion, and their cognitive bias levels which were affected by explicit emotions, decreased and disappeared with the increase of age, while the subjects'unconscious processing abilities towards subliminal information increased with the growth of ages. A sharp change was found between age of 5 and 6. In this study, the influence of emotion on cognition investigated by our series experiments did not show gender differences in subjects of any ages. ERP research demonstrated that emotion-facilitating group received little intervention from emotional information at the early stage of cognition processing, which enabled them to input more energies when they needed to address cognitive task at the later stage, but the case with the emotion-intervention group was opposite. Such a pattern was displayed in which the left brain was influenced more while the right brain was influenced less. This pattern applied to both positive and negative emotions. Therefore, susceptibility to emotion is the dynamic attributes of psychological elements, and it was reflected in multi-dimensions and multi-levels of emotional influences on cognitive efficiency and bias on both the level of consciousness and unconsciousness, this performance on different levels and dimensions will show a tendency to deviate and weaken with each other, while this seemingly contradictory phenomenon is likely to be the natural effect in the maturing process of frontal lobe.
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