The Relationship Of Valence、Arousal And Basic Emotion Under Automatic Process Paradigm:An ERP Study

The rise of basic emotion theory can be traced back to Darwin’s time, and it attracted many researchers to work on it, and many interesting discovery had been found. But it was not until the1980s when the Social construction thought began that basic emotion theory was challenged. Though there was drawback in basic emotion theory, it was one of the leading theory in the field of emotion. And many researches were still difficult to get out of its confine.In this paper, we explored the relationship of valence and arousal and their relationship with basic emotion using the technique of ERPs. To make the experiments more precise, we chose cross-modal delayed response paradigm which was changed according to the experiment. The experimental materials were selected from International affective pictures (IAPS) and Ren-Lai Zhou and his students made it usable to Chinese context. Data in the experiments was from Zhou’s study. In study1, we paired valence or arousal of the pictures respectively. In study2, we classified the pictures according to Mikels’study and then paired valence or arousal of the pictures simultaneously to eliminate the impact caused by valence and arousal.In experiment1, we could detect the interaction between valence and arousal during150-250ms、250-350ms and350-450ms. This showed valence and arousal moderated the brain wave jointly. SLORETA results showed high arousal pictures led to higher activation in anterior cingutate compared with low arousal pictures (Brodmann area24). And the difference came up to significant level. At the same time, we could detect similar activation between negative emotion pictures. When we analyzed different electrodes correspondingly in frontal area (F7and F8、Fp1and Fp2). We found significant difference between different arousal pictures in the left frontal area, but not in the right frontal area. In experiment2, we detected significant difference between fear pictures and disgust pictures during N1、200-300ms and300-400ms.Comprehensively, we could draw the following conclusions:(1) Valence and arousal were not independent under automatic process paradigm.(2) The processing mechanism of high arousal pictures and low arousal pictures was different under positive valance condition.(3) The left frontal lobe was important for the distinction between high arousal pictures and low arousal picture.(4) Fear pictures and disgust pictures were different in drawing attention of the subject.(5) Different kinds of basic emotions had different neural mechanisms, and the difference of these neural mechanisms had nothing to do with the valence and arousal.