Attention Processing Stimulated By Self-threatening

Threat is literally to induce several negative emotions such as intension,anxiety,fear,being hurt etc.A sense of threat is the internal motive to act out.The definition of self-threat is the threat to self-concept which occurred when the self-image is questioned,refuted,blamed,sneered,challenged or in danger.At the beginning of behavior science research,a lot of cognition,emotion and behavior phenomena are thought to be the effort of coping with threats and protecting oneself.From Freud' s early discussion of the ego's reactions to events that challenge its ability to negotiate the demands of the id and superego to contemporary social psychologists' efforts to understand the effects of ego threats on people's emotions,self-images,and social interactions,a wide array of social and behavioral scientists appear convinced that threats to the ego influences human behavior in important ways.Existing studies have found that the threat to self-concept motive subjects to search for social conection,be caution for the coming tasks,react to negative words more slowly,and inhibit the advantage of self-face recognition.However,former studies collect the behavior and attitude data after being threatened via questionnaire survey and sociometer technique.Moreover,the stimulus that being adopted is lack of uniqueness.Furthermore,there has been barely systematic research on the cognitive processing about self-threat stimuli.As to the disadvantage of former researches discussed above,the current study adopted self-twist face as self-threat stimuli so as to induce the feeling of self-threat.The current study focused on the cognitive processing about self-threat stimuli via self-twist face from space to time course of attention and also manipulated the situation of human relationship and working memory,which expanded the connotative and marginal meaning of the perceptive self.Self-acceptance is a positive attitude to self and one's all characteristics and is also an attituce to willingly accept the realistic self with no self-abasement because of the self-imperfection and false,which is an indicator for mental health.There is an important theoretical foundation for self-acceptance in scientific theory of evolution,which ascertained that self-acceptance is evolved from the process of human beings in struggling with the survival and reproduction issues.Then,how does self-accptptance come into being?This study tried to explore the processing and mechanism of generation of self-acceptance from social cognition with the adaptable processing to environmental stimulus angle via self-threat stimuli as the reacting object,which could instruct clinical practice and correct the cognitional and behavioral bias brought from self-threat in clinical individuals.The current studies explored the spatial attentional process of self-threat stimuli in sole present and human relationship situation via cue-target and dot-probe paradigm.The current studies also explored the attentional process of self-threat stimuli during time course via Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task.Moreover,the current studies explored the impact of working memory on inhibition of return(IOR)via cue-target paradigm.The working memory situation included high and low working memory load.Also the working memory situation included content and space location consistency estimation.The results showed that compared with self-neutral stimuli,the attentional processing bias of the self-threat stimuli was mainly reflected on the attentional holding and the attentional bias in stranger situation.The results also showed that self-threat stimuli was not good at attentional capture during time course and was adjusted by working memory load.Details are as follows:(1)The characteristic of attentional processing on space was mainly reflected on attention holding on cue location and on attention capturing on target.The results of cue-target experiment on attention showed that the self-threat stimuli on cue location weakened the inhibitory label and thereby adjust the subsequent searching and attentional bias,which significantly reduced the amount of inhibition of return.The results of cue-target experiment on attention also showed that the self-threat stimuli on target location captured attention aggressively and the target stimuli became severe,which was apt to induce attentional bias and then relieve the inhibition to the cue location on space attention.When self-threat stimuli were presented simultaneously on both cue and target location,both the situational cue and target stimulus were severe,which significantly accelerated the reacting time on the self-twist face as the target stimuli.Moreover,the inhibition of return remained significant.The results above showed that the subject was able to tag an inhibition on self-threat stimuli in situational cues thereby putting attentional resources into the searching for the target stimuli,which reflected the effect on self-acceptance during the reaction to the target stimuli.On the other hand,the results of experiments on dot-probe paradigm showed that attentional bias on self-threat stimuli appeared only in front of strangers,while the attentional bias on self-neutral stimuli appeared in front of both strange and familiar individuals,which could be speculated that the attentional bias to self-threat stimuli trigged the motivation of self-protect.(2)The attentional processing characteristic of self-threat stimuli during the time course was reflected on the inability to the attention capture compare with the self-neutral stimuli.Specifically,in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Task(RSVP),comparing with self-neutral stimuli,self-threat stimuli on T2 location was not good at attention capture.There were no significant differences between self-neutral and self-twist faces on T1 location.(3)The effect on the attention to self-threat stimuli by working memory load is as follows:Under high working memory load,the reaction time of self-threat stimuli was getting significant slower,which means the attention holding to the self-threat stimuli.During the middle of the attentional processing,N2 and N250 components were not significant on amplitudes on both self-neutral and self-twist face,which means self-threat stimuli does not have significant capability of attention capture.During the middle-to-late of the attentional processing,at the F3 pole on the left prefrontal lobe,the latency of P3a between self-neutral and self-twist face was experimentally different.The self-threat stimuli represented by self-twist face,compared with self-neutral stimuli,did not interrupt the inhibition label on cue location and was still flexible on its attention resource,which could be concluded that the neural base of self-acceptance appears on the later stage of attentional processing.The Pz pole on the central of parietal lobe was devoted more attention resource under high working memory load,which caused the latency of P3b much longer than the low working memory load circumstance and reflected the attention adjustment to self-threat stimuli under high working memory load and the promotion to the self-acceptance come into being.(4)The effect on the self-threat stimuli attentional processing by the type of working memory task is as follows.The attentional bias of self-threat stimuli on cue location counteracted with the attention resource occupied by the space working memory task,which made no effect on the inhibition of return for self-threat stimuli by space working memory task.This effect also testified the attentional bias on the attention of self-threat stimuli.At working memory task of the gender consistency checking,the inhibition of return on the self-threat stimuli disappeared because of the overlap between the weakened inhibition label by the self-threat stimuli and the attentional bias under strange human relationship circumstance.In conclusion,the attentional processing on self-threat stimuli has its own characteristic different from self-neutral stimuli.The current studies have brought up the characteristic of the attentional processing on self-threat stimuli from the information processing aspect.The attentional bias appears in both environmental and strange situation,which appears to be the attentional capture and holding in space dimension and also appears to be the attentional blink in time gap.The speed of self-threat stimuli attentional processing is significantly slower after the working memory task.High working memory load adjusts the attentional bias of self-threat stimuli in electrophysiology level.The attentional bias on the attention of self-threat stimuli neutralizes the effect on the space inhibition of return by the space working memory task.As to the self-threat stimuli,the significant attentional bias appears on space dimention,which reflects the obvious strategy on attentional resources allocation.On the time dimention,the self-threat stimuli is easy to have attention blink,that is to say it is not easy to hold attention on neural function level.Therefore,the results of this study shows that the attentional processing on self-threat stimuli reflects the cognition mechanism of self-acceptance.It might be possible to change the attentional bias to self-threat stimuli through attention training to clinicial individuals.