The Impact Of Perceptual Load And Trait Anxiety On Emotion Processing In Fear Conditioning

Emotions and feelings on human survival and growth can be said to be very important. Emotion is one of the most important research issues in psychology. A series of emotional disorders and mental imbalance caused by a lack of emotional equilibrium have become a hot topic of psychological research. Research indicates that the threat-related stimuli are processed preferentially, especially for individuals with high trait anxiety. However, debates about the automatic processing and control processing of emotion still exit. Some studies show that the perception and processing of threat-related stimulus such as an angry facial expression is clearly an important skill essential to human survival and as such, is likely to occur automatically.On the contrary, because the processing capacity of attention system is limited, contrary views are that the processing of emotional information also needs the control of attention. So why these studies come to a different conclusion? Based on previous studies, we believe that these studies only considered one aspect of the problem. Attention can be guided either by the preattentive processing such as significant stimulus(eg, affective significance) which lead to attentional bias or by attentional control relevant to the performance of tasks. And individual difference in personality traits is also likely to affect the processing of information, resulting in attention bias toward stimulus.On the basis of relevant research findings, this study uses questionnaires and behavioral experiments by combining the use of fear conditioning paradigm and Flanker paradigm. We use the facial expression materials and letters as stimuli in order to test whether emotional information processing needs attention.Also we explored the role of trait anxiety in the processing of emotional information.The results show that:(1) On the correct rate, the main effect of perceptual load is significantly, namely in the high perceptual load condition,the accuracy of correct reaction is significantly less than that of the low perceptual load condition. Other effects are not significant.(2) On the reaction time, the results show that the main effect of perceptual load, namely in the high perceptual load conditions, the target reaction time was significantly greater than that of in low load conditions. The main effect of distractor affective significance is not significant. The interaction between affective significance and trait anxiety is significant. Interaction between trait anxiety and perceptual load is not significant.(3) The results of Simple Effects Analysis further showed differences in emotional significance is significant in high trait anxiety level, that’s to say, in high trait anxiety level, the CS+ stimuli was significantly lower than that of CS- on reaction time, while in the low trait anxiety level, distractor affective significance is not significant. Namely, for the high trait anxiety individuals, distractor affective significance have different impacts toward the letter search tasks. But for the low trait anxiety, different levels of affective significance have no effect on the reaction time.(4)We use independent samples t-test to exmanie subject’s subjective ratings towards the aversiveness of noises with a 5-point Likert scale.The results show that the differences in mean is significant.Aversiveness of low trait anxiety group was significantly greater than that of in the high trait anxiety group.These results show that:(1) The processing of emotional information is not automatic, but influenced by attentional control, namely, it needs attentional resources to a certain extent.(2) Perceptual load is an important factor in deciding whether emotional information gets processing,when the perceptual load of the main task is effectively controlled, irrelevant distractors are unable to be processed.(3) Individual difference in trait anxiety is an important factor in the attentional control of emotional processing.High trait anxious individuals can detect threat stimulus more quickly.Emotion processing is more automatic for high trait anxious individuals relative to low trait anxious individuals.(4) Trait anxiety regulates the level of attentional resources needed to process threatening stimuli. High trait anxiety is linked to impoverished attentional control towards threat stimulus.