An ERP Study Of Response To Emotional Stimuli Of Different Levels Of Shyness Individuals

Shyness is a common psychological phenomenon. Henderson defined shyness as discomfort and/or repression in the social intercourse situation, a kind of fear to negative evaluation companied upset or repression. Shyness can greatly influence participate behaviors to expectant activity or pursue behaviors to the individual and the occupation target. Many scholars believe that shyness can be an independent personality trait, and influences various developments of the individual. Emotion is a key component of personality, the core of personality. Special personality trait can influence the emotional receptivity and behavior of individuals.This study combines the questionnaires and ERP (Event-Related Potentials) methods to test the brain evoked potentials of different levels of shy individuals. The research uses questionnaire to select the testees,then adopts picture perception paradigm to evoke cortical potential, investigates the differences of brain cortical potentials between different valence of emotional pictures. This study analyzes the evoked cortical potentials,tries to find out the cognitive nerve characteristic of shy individuals, compared with non-shy individuals.The results are as follows:1,In many ERP components at the early stage of emotion processing (100-300ms after stimuli), different valence stimuli evoke different amplitudes. In response to the distribution of early visual processing attention on the P1 component, positive, negative pictures evoke more positive-going amplitudes as compared to neutral pictures, indicating that the brain pay more attention to emotional pictures than neutral pictures at the early automatic processing stage.2,In the ERP study of emotion, equal probability picture perception paradigm can evoke obvious late positive potential in many areas of brain. The significant main effect of stimuli valence of late positive potential mainly shows in frontal, occipital and temporal-occipital region, different valence stimuli evoke different amplitudes.3,During 300-550ms, main effect of personality is significant in left frontal, during 550-800ms, main effect of personality is significant in both left and right frontal. High shyness individuals evoke more negative-going late positive potential than low shyness individuals. This difference mainly manifests in frontal area.