An ERP Study Investigating The Regulation Of Cognitive Tasks On Expressive Faces Processing

Emotion regulation is the hotspot and advancing topic in the multidisciplinary study such as current emotional field, developmental psychology and health psychology. At all the times, psychologists study deeply the process of emotion regulation and put forward different theory modal, as indicated by American psychologists, Gross & Campos, there is a simultaneity between emotion and emotion regulation during the time course, which means that emotion regulation goes with emotion in its overall process, that is, the emotion occurrence process is right the emotion regulation one. They consider that emotion regulation process is divided into two stages, antecedent-focused emotion regulation and response-focused emotion regulation. Though their theoretical model intensifies the understanding of emotion regulation process, it lacks support from empirical study at present.At present, in the most of studies on emotion regulation at home and abroad, the developmental features of emotion regulation and emotion regulation strategies, or by the application of brain imaging techniques, such as fMRI and PET, researchers start to study the neurophysiological mechanism of emotion regulation, however, due to the low temporal resolution of brain imaging techniques, such as fMRI and PET, further studies on time features of dynamic process of emotion regulation have been implemented rarely. To further test the antecedent-focused emotion regulation in the Gross's emotion regulation model, and to make up the deficiency in the brain imaging studies, by means of the event related potentials technique, whose temporal resolution is higher, and use stimulate material of Chinese's expressive faces with medial valence, this study discusses the regulation of cognitive tasks on emotional stimuli about time characters, by changing the subjects' attention to expressive faces in different cognitive tasks, and further investigates the dynamic process characters of emotion regulation.This study included two experiments, both of which adopted the experimental paradigm of equiprobability. In the first experiment, the subjects were asked to view passively different expressive faces pictures, to investigate the effect of emotional stmuli on cognitive process. Inthe second experiment, there were two cognitive tasks. In the first cognitive task, gender judgment was implemented to divert the subjects' attention to non-emotional features of stimuli, and in the second cognitive task, expression recognition was implemented to divert the subjects' attention to emotional features of stimuli. By the comparison between stimuli processing, time features of regulation of cognitive tasks on emotional stimuli were discussed. The findings in this study are shown as follows:1. Under the condition of viewing passively, compared with neutral faces, fear faces increase greatly the amplitude of VPP, and show general evaluation of emotional importance in N200, however, there is no difference between two kinds of faces in the other early components, such as P100, NlOO and N170, and late component of P200.2. Under the condition of viewing passively, compared with neutral faces, happy faces affect greatly the latency of N170, and reflect the category perception of expression in the component of P200, however, there is no difference between two kinds of faces in the other early and late components.3. During the regulation process of cognitive tasks, in all the early components of faces processing, there is difference between expression faces and neutral ones in N100, N170 and VPP, and no difference in P100.4. During the regulation process of cognitive tasks, in all the late components of faces processing, there is difference between happy faces and neutral ones in N200, P300 and LPC, and the difference between fear faces and neutral ones in P300 and LPC.5. In the component of P300, cognitive tasks have great regulating effects on neutral faces, and in the component of LPC, cognitive tasks have great main effects on happy faces.To sum up, the following conclusions are drawn:First, under the condition of viewing passively, in the ERP components, there is difference between neutral faces and expression ones in the early component of VPP and late components of P200 and N200.Second, in the components of NlOO, N170 and VPP, cognitive tasks can regulate the difference between neutral faces and expression faces processing.Third, in the component of P300, cognitive tasks can regulate greatly the neutral faces processing, in the component of LPC, cognitive tasks can regulate greatly the happy facesprocessing, and in the components of P300 and LPC, cognitive tasks can regulate indistinctly, but tendentiously, the fear faces processing.