A Study On Event-related Potential About Implicit Process Of Attitude

The research of implicit attitude has been an important area in theregion of modern psychology. Much of research on attitude activation hasemployed various experimental tasks and methods, and the result of theintensive research implies that attitudes can be activated automatically,and have influence on next things. Based on such, So far three kinds ofmodels have been proposed. About the problem on the process of implicitattitudes activated automatically, there is still debate over the results ofdifferent studies.The present study used event-related potential (ERP) to investigatethe possible underlying neural and psychology mechanisms of theaffective priming effect on stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA).Twenty-eight young native-Chinese-speakers(14 males,14 females)participated in the study, Whose average ages are 22 years old. TheChinese trait words were used as primes and targets to investigate theaffective priming effects during evaluative categorization task in twoSOA conditions, i.e. 300ms and 400ms. Reaction times (RT)and ERPs arerecorded by using 128-channel ERP technology.In the result we find: in both dates, there are obviously the affectivepriming effect, which showed incongruent trials were faster thanaffectively congruent trials in each SOA condition, and A N400 in Frontal lobe and central region that larger negative amplitudes were found forincongruent pairs than congruent pairs, and with the growing time ofSOA, the effect become greater. In Evaluative Priming Paradigm, thereare negative biases. This suggests that negative traits are given greaterweight in overall evaluations than are positive traits. In both RT andERPs, there are some differences, ERPs more probably showed theimplicit processes in evaluative categorization.