The Influence Of Emotional State On Cognitive Set Shifting

The ability of set shifting will promote children adapt to the environment. Being an important sub-component of executive function (EF), set shifting attracted more people to research it. Set shifting means the control process of switch from one stimulus-reaction rule to another;the process is included in the attention and reaction preparedness. The developmental research of executive function shows that the EF develops significantly in age 6 and age 10. So the ability of set shifting may develop faster in these ages. Moreover, some fMRI research show that emotion has some influence on set shifting. The main cerebrum areas of emotion and set shifting are the same, especially in the ACC and PFC.In this study, emotional films were utilized to induce children's emotional state in order to investigate the influence of emotional state on set shifting, and investigate the develop trend of set shifting ability. Children are required to finish the set-shifting tasks of different difficulty level in the emotional state. Task switch paradigm is used to research set shifting, and the numbers of tasks are controlled to form three difficulty levels, they are two tasks switch, three tasks switch and four tasks switch. 192 children are participate in the research, they are divided into four age groups, 8 years old, 9 years old, 10 years old and 12 years old, each age group has 48 children.The results of the study showed that the main effect of emotion is significant in the two tasks switch experiment, and the reaction time in positive emotion is larger than negative emotion;however, in the three tasks switch and four tasks switch experiment, there is no significant emotional effect. The switch effect are significant in all the three experiment, it means the reaction time of repeat condition is smaller than the switch condition, But in the three tasks and four tasks switch experiment, there is difference in the reaction speed and error rate, in the three tasks switch experiment, the reaction time of 9 years old children is significantly larger than 8 years old and 10 years old. In the four tasks switch experiment, the error rates of 12 years old children is lower than the other children.These findings suggest there is switch cost when all the children do the task switch experiment, without the influence of age and difficulty level. The difference of the reaction time between 10 years old children and 9 years, 12 years old children issignificant;furthermore, the error rate of 8 years old children is higher than other age group. All this means, 10 years old may be an important age of set shifting. Emotional state has significant influence on two tasks switch experiment, but there is no significant influence on the other two experiments.