A Study Of Attentional Habituation To Self-relevant Emotional Stimuli

As the threshold of cognitive processing, attention almost determine what information we have to process to a large extent. Compared to neutral stimuli, when emotional stimuli information appears, attention tends to mobilize more resources to processing them, even if these information are constantly repeated, the brain still remains highly active processing to resist habituation resulting from repeated information. When the self-related stimuli presented, the individual compares with the information and the existed self-schema in his brain. During the cognitive processing, the information self-related and self-unrelated in consistent and conflicting situation will be shown in different processing resources. It appears that processing resources of familiar information will be reduced in order to devote more attention resources to inconsistent stimuli.In order to understand the emotions of individual elicited by literal stimuli as the similar affect of attentional habituation as picture stimuli as well as to understand the self-relevant and emotional literal stimuli in the cognitive processing on the cerebral cortex activation , we utilize two visuospatial attention paradigm's experiments, investigating emotional words as well as ERPs components that cognitive processing self-related emotional words.The results showed that: (1) Emotional words at the early attention processing did not appear obvious habituation effect, but three different stimuli had varying trend of attentional habituation, the negative stimuli was the most resistant to attentional habituation. (2) The ERPs components elicited by emotional words reflected processing advantages on latency and amplitude than by neutral words. (3) Self-related emotional words at the early attention processing appeared obvious habituation effect, three types of stimuli showed a significant trend of habituation. (4) The ERPs components elicited by self-related positive words and self-unrelated negative words showed processing advantages on the latency and amplitude than self-unrelated neutral words. These results suggest that emotional processing triggered by literal stimuli is less than by pictures; negative stimuli appears to be a manifestation of the "negativity bias" ; positive emotion promote self-related stimuli's processing.