Executive Control Reduce Negative Emotional Effect

Emotions is a psychological phenomenon, it is very important for human survival, fear make us away from threat event,attacks allow us to protect our own interests, disgust let us exclude toxic irritants, so emotional events or stimulus can attract more attention compare to non-emotional stimulus. a rich literature has documented that emotion can disrupt ongoing processing and place heightened demands on control when it serves as task-irrelevant stimuli. Previous results demonstrated that executive control may help reduce such emotional influence.Malfunctions in the relationship between executive control and emotion were found in people suffering from different mood disorder such as depression and anxiety. It seems that executive control can reduce emotional effect. This dissertation want to testify this effect through three Behavioral experiments.In experiment one,there are 36 participants, we used 2(congruent,incongruent)x 2(negtive, neutral) design.Participants viewed negative and neutral task-irrelevant pictures, which preceded a Flanker target. The result demonstrate that the interaction between valence and congruity was significant,This interaction revealed that negative pictures delayed RTs in the congruent trails, but this delay was diminished in incongruent trails.To directly examine if executive control can attenuate emotion, the conflict situation should occur before the emotional stimulus appears. Accordingly, in Experiment 2 the Flanker task preceded the emotional stimuli.we assessed emotional interference in this study by using the RTs of the discrimination task. There are 30 participants.we used 2(congruent,incongruent)x 2(negtive, neutral) design And we found the interaction between congruity and valence,This interaction revealed that negative pictures delayed RTs in the congruent trails, but this delay was diminished in incongruent trails.In experiment three,we change the material of experiment 2,and we use Stroop task instead of Flanker task as executive control task. There are 30 student participant in the experiment, we used 2(congruent,incongruent)× 2(negtive, neutral) design. The result is negative pictures delayed RTs in the task,and this delay was larger in the congruent condition than in the incongruent condition 。Accordingly, we suggest that our emotional system is continually monitored by executive control processes.