An ERP Study On How Self-awareness Affect Emotion Experience

Self-awareness refers to the inner subjective state of individual when he is aware of himself. And it can influence emotion experience, making emotion experience more intensive or dull. In addition, self-awareness effect in emotion experience is modulated by standards, such as emotion standard and individual standard. The present study aimed to investigate how emotion experience changed in the condition of self-awareness or standards, especially the neural mechanism. Therefore, the present study included three ERP experiments, adopting a mirror to manipulate self-awareness. There were two groups(high self-awareness, low self-awareness) in Experiment 1, which were asked to access their emotion experience after seeing emotional pictures. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine whether self-awareness strengthened emotion experience or not. Then, based on Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was used to discover how self-awareness effect changed when there was an emotional standard. Experiment 3 was to explore the role of social standard in emotion experience, trying to expose the essence of standards.The results were as follows:(1) The scores in high self-awareness, which came from subjective reporting, was significantly higher than that in low self-awareness. And, there was also a corresponding increase in amplitude of a frontal late positive potential component(LPP) in high self-awareness, which was compared with low self-awareness.(2) When setting up an emotional standard, neither behavior data nor frontal LPP showed significant difference between high self-awareness and low self-awareness.(3) Self-awareness induced larger frontal LPP amplitude relative to social standard.(4) In the early attentional stage, high self-awareness elicited larger P2 than low self-awareness and other awareness, while low self-awareness and other awareness induced greater N2.(5) No matter what context was, negative emotion elicited larger P300 amplitude than positive and neutral emotion, and this effect on parietal LPP amplitude was also pronounced.In summary, whatever the condition was, individuals are able to code and process emotional stimuli effectively. Moreover, self-awareness can enhance the intensity of emotion experience because it facilitates individual to focus on his subjective behavior. However, due to self- regulation and emotional regulation, emotional standard and social standard will impair emotion experience.