Processing Specificity Of Threat Action Information: Behavior And ERPs

It is very important for individual to survive and adapt to the environment by effectively processing the threatening information transmitted by the body actions.However,previous studies often use negative emotional body movements such as anger and fear as experimental materials of examining the threatening information processing.Regarding these body movements convey emotion-intention dual character,they not only transmit emotional information,but also threatening social information.Because of emotion processing has the characteristics of automation and priority,it will bring interference to the threatening information processing,until to now,we did not know whether the threatening information processing of human body movements has specificity or not.This study selected violent body actions which does not carry explicit emotional information but also direct threatening information as main experimental material to solve two main research blind spots:first,because the previous studies claim that actions conveying threatening information have the processing advantage,is there a special processing for the threatening information conveyed by the action?Second,threatening actions with different intensities could induce different effects on people's survival,such as extreme threat would induce more destruction than threat of moderate threat,thus,will the human brain be sensitive to different intensities threatening actions?On the basis of a detailed analysis of the above bottleneck--the shackles of experimental observation angle and the confusion in traditional investigating threatening psychological processes on negative emotion and threat,this study used the unique advantages of ERP,which has a high time resolution,binding behavior and electrophysiological indexes,on the basis of previous general perceptual processing paradigm,utilizing the most common violent body actions as materials,explored threatening information processing and mechanism.The main findings are as follows:(1)Due to the automatization and priority processing characteristics of emotion,the processing of emotion carried by body movements can influence the processing of threatening information.It not only supports the emotional body movements have the duality of emotion and intention,but also finds that there is a special electrophysiological component EFP(early frontal positivity)in the processing of threatening body actions.(2)No matter what individual,interpersonal or intergroup threat actions,they could trigger the controlled processing of human brain.It is shown that there is a significant difference in the electrophysiological components of EFP between threatening and non-threatening actions under various action conditions.(3)According to the behavioral data,along the increase of perceptual load,the reaction time to body actions become more length.From the EEG data,the processing of the N2 stage was independent of the perceptual load level and is an automated processing.In the EFP stage,processing was a controlled processing.No matter whether the perceptual load was high or not,participants would not process task-irrelevant body actions,showing that there were no differences between threatening and nonthreatening body actions at this stage.(4)There is only a threatening information processing advantage of human body,but not self-related effect of threatening information.In addition,information toward self may be considered a threat to the human brain,thus,the non-threatening action toward self induced more positivity drifting than non-threatening action toward others.(5)No matter what approach or avoid task,reaction time become shorter along with the increase of threatening level,in addition,the reaction time on inter-group condition was shortest,the result shows that the human brain is sensitive to prominent threatening information.In summary,this study firstly provides the evidence of emotion-intention duality to emotional body movements,and also found the electrophysiological evidence(EFP)of threatening information processing.In addition,this study also examined the threatening information processing characteristics of body actions(a,threat information of body action conveyed is characteristics of partial automatic processing,threatening information processing advantages of body actions is general,there is no self-relevance advantages).On this basis,this study proposes a two-stage processing model of threatening information transmitted by body actions(threat information detection stage,threat information evaluation stage).In the first stage,the N2 stage,is the detection stage of the threat information,showing an automatic processing feature.The second stage,the EFP stage,is the evaluation stage of the threat information,showing a controlled processing feature.The proposed model is of enlightening significance to the further exploration of the general perception process of threatening information.