Proactive And Reactive Control During Emotional Interference

Emotioal conflict is a new psychological research field,which is stemmed fromthe research of cognitive conflict.In classic Stroop paradigms, increasing theproportion of control-demanding incongruent trials results in strategic adjustments inbehavior and implementation of cognitive control processes. We manipulatedexpectancy for incongruent trials in an emotional facial Stroop task to investigate thebehavioral effects of proportion manipulation in a cognitively demanding task withemotional stimuli. The research includes two sets of experiments.The first group ofexperiments, in the level of consciousness,uses emotional words as a primestimulus,use emotional faces as target and request subjects to determine the type ofthe target.Subjects performed a high expectancy (HE) task (70%incongruent trials)and a low expectancy (LE) task (30%incongruent trials). As in standard Stroop tasks,there is a typical consistency effect and behavioral interference（I-C）was reduced inthe emotional facial Stroop HE task compared to the LE task.This shows that,underthe condition of conscious,individuals tend to adopt proactive control strategy.The second group of experiments uses emotional faces as prime stimulus,usewhich differents from priming stimulus emotional faces as target,the same goal is toallow subjects to determine the type of the target.By operating the different level ofconsciousness,Subjects performed a high expectancy (HE) task (60%incongruenttrials),a low expectancy (LE) task (20%incongruent trials) and a neutralexpectancy(NE) task(20%incongruent trials).The results showed that there isconsistency of effect and conflict adaptation effect.And in the three tasktypes,behavioral interference was reduced in the emotional facial Stroop HE taskcompared to the LE task.Under the condition of no masking,there is a typicalconsistency effect in accuracy and reaction time.And the behavioral interference（I-C）was reduced in the emotional facial Stroop HE task compared to the LEtask.This shows that individuals are more inclined to adopt the proactive controlstrategy under the condition of consciousness.However under the condition ofmasking, there is a typical conflict adaptation effect in accuracy and reaction time.The results show that individuals could better use reactive cognitive control strategyin the unconscious level. In conclusion,individuals are more inclined to adopt the proactive controlstrategy under the condition of consciousness.However, in the unconsciouslevel,because of the lack of effective clue information guide, individuals couldbetter use reactive cognitive control strategy.At the same time, the results also showthat compared words as prime stimulus,when emotional faces as stimulus,the moreprone to excite effects of conflict.