Note That The Load On The Facial Expression Processing

Emotion and feelings play a very crucial role in our social life and interpersonal relationships. Psychology, cognitive neuroscience and a number of cross-disciplinary are working hard to reveal the neural mechanisms of emotional processing and disfunction of emotional disorders. The relationship between emotional processing and attentional resources now is a research hotspot in social cognitive neuroscience. Whether the processing of emotion needs the attentional resources or not and which attentional stage it begins at are discussed in.many studies. Some finds the allocation of attentional resources does not affect the processing of emotional stimuli, such as facial expression. There are also many other studies that find the processing of emotion depends on the attentional resources. Compare with the non-emotional stimuli, emotional stimuli, especially negative emotional stimuli can attract more attention or occupy attention, which lead to attentional bias. This divergence might result from the different level of attentional load task used to cost attentional resources among studies. As one of the most important emotional display, facial expression is now an important research material used by researchers to reveal emotional processing. Therefore, this study used facial expression as emotional stimuli to explore the impact of attentional load on emotional processing, so as to provide an empirical basis and theoretical support to solve the problem that whether emotional prccessing depends on attentional resource. In addtion, a typical manifestation of some emotional disorder and mental disease is the decline in ability to control attention, so this study can provide a theoretical basis and practical basis to solve the appropriate medical and social problems.This study used a combination of behavior and event-related potentials(ERP) methods with combination of different attentional load of letters research pictures and positive, neutral and negative facial expression, and ask the students to finish different attentional load letter research task, to examine the characteristics of the time of emotional processing. All is to explore the relationship between emotional processing and the allocation of resources. The study consists of three behavior experiments and an ERP experiment:Experiment 1 which used an improved blind paradigm, asked the participants to complete the letter search task and facial detection task, so as to examine the effect of high and low level attentional load task on the different facial expression detection task, when the faces were presented on the edge of the screen. Experiment 2 which used a similar experimental paradigm as experiment 1,asked the participants to complete the letter search task and facial detection task, so as to examine the effect of high and low level attentional load task on the different facial expression detection task, when the faces were presented on the center of the screen. Experiment 3 which is based on experiment 1 and experiment 2, asked the participants to complete letter search task of different attentional load, to examine the attention allocation between letter search task and different facial expression displayed as a distraction when the faces were presented on the edge and the center of the screen. Experiment 4 which is improved on the basis of experiment 3, using the research techniques of event-related potentials, asked participarits to complete letter search task of different attentional load, recorded the ERP differences which is triggered by different facial expression presented on the center of the screen, to examine-the attentional allocation between letter search task and different facial expression displayed as a distraction.Integrated four experimental results and relevant discussions, this study got the following several conclusions:1 The level of attentional load does affect the processing of facial-expression. The reaction time of face detection task under high attentional load is longer and the accuracy is lower.2 The location where facial expression is displayed can affect the ability of attracting attentional resources of the face. The face presented on the center of the screen is in the dominant position of competition for resources, and can get more attentional resources than face presented on the edge of the screen.3 The processing of negative face is not depend on the allocation of attentional resources under some condition. Negative face can attract more attentional resources than positive and neutral faces under inattentional condition and the superiority does not depend on the allocation of attentional resources under certain conditions. The ability of attracting attentional resources of different emotion is different. So the relationship between allocation of attentional resources and the processing of specific emotion should be investigated in further research.