Research On The Information Framing Effects Under Paroxysmal Events Based On Brain Potential Analysis

Human society is entering a developing period of risky society which is characterised to be a society in which paroxyrmal public events occur frequently. These events may cause severe damage to human lives and their properties. As a result, more and more study concern have been posed to the paroxyrmal public events and the associated rescue operations. Except for the decision-maker’s quick and proper decision making, the behavior of peoples in the event could also have significant impact on the effectiveness of the rescue operation. They could be many singal ones that push and squeeze with each other and rob things out of their born ability. On the other hand, they could also be ones that actively follow the rules in emergency and show their hands in the rescue operation. There are many factors that could affect people’s behavior in the events and one of these factors is their perception of the effectiveness of the previous rescue results.Study of behavioral decision-making have shown that there are many cognitive bais that could significantly affect people’s judgement and decision-making and drive them make some irrational decisons. One of these cognitive bias is framing effects. Studies of attribute framing effects have shown that evaluations of outcome or events depend crucially on whether the outcome or events are framed positively or negatively. In specific, events would be evaluated more favorably when they were presented in positive terms than when they were presented in negative terms. The question is whether the attribute framing effects will also occur in the problem context of paroxyrmal public events and what is the associated underlying neural mechanisms. These questions are the core of the present study and also the basic scientific questions in emergency management of the paroxyrmal public events that require a quick answer.Based on the famous "Asian Disease Problems", we designed three studies to investigate the information attribute framing effects in paroxyrmal public events and its associated underlying neural mechanisms. Our result that people’s evaluations were significantly affected by the frames outcomes were presents are consistent with previous studies. Besides, the effect appeared to be rather robust and unaffected by factors such as gender, group size and experimental design. Most importantly, the frame did not only have significant impact on subject’s behavior, but also on the ERP component, the FRN, which is called the feedback-related negativity. In studies of neural decision-making, it has been suggested that the FRN reflects the activity of a monitoring system located in the ACC which is responsible for evaluation of outcome of events along a good-bad dimension. In the third study of the present paper, we found that, when the factor of affective was considered, the framing effect on the FRN amplitude was significant only in the condition when the subjects received stimulus of negative affect. Considering the fact that negative affect is the main affective experience, this result further demonstates that the present study is of great practical significance. In conclusion, our results indicate that, in order to ensure that the rescue operation is taken effectively, the associated information in paroxyrmal public events should be presented in positive terms instead of negative terms.The main innovations of the present study might be concluded as follows:(1) In terms of the framing effects classification, the present study was actually an example of attribute framing effects. In contrast, most previous studies which were conducted under the context of paroxyrmal public events (i.e., Asian disease problems) were examples of risky framing effects. The key difference between the two kinds of framing manipulation is that attribute framing does not involve a mubipulation of riskiness while the risky choice framing does. From this viewpoint, attribute framing was considered to represents the simplest case of framing which is expecially useful for gaining a basic understanding of how outcome frame influences information processing.(2) By using the ERP technique and the attribute framing manipulation, the present study investigated the underlying mechanisms associated with framing effects. Previously, framing effects study were conducted mainly on the level of behavior and many different theories that compete with each other were developed. By using brain imaging techniques widely used in cognitive neural science, the "black box" of our brain is gradually opened which enable us to understand the mechanisms underlying framing effects deeply and objectively.(3) In terms of the decision-making study, the present study investigated the neural mechanisms of outcome evaluation based on the problem context of framing effects. In most previous studies, researchers have used simple gambling games and found that, when compared with positive outcomes indicating gains, negative outcomes indicating losses elicited different neural processing. Importantly, these outcomes did not only different from each other in frames, but also affected subjects’ utility in completely opposite directions. In comtrast, outcomes in different frames are actually equivalent in framing effects.