The Contrastive Study Of Basic Emotion And Meta-emotion Based On ERP

Meta-emotion emerged in1996as a new research field in psychology. Currently there are some imbalances in the study of meta-emotion, such as the tendency of research content—more relevant research than experiment, the imbalance of research subject—most of which are teenagers, and regional distinctions—there are not much achievements in China compare with other countries. However, meta-emotion has been catching growing numbers of attentions due to its ability of observation, experience, evaluation and adjustment of emotion.This paper discusses the relationship between basic-emotion and meta-emotion in terms of cognitive neuroscience through two experiments. The first one discusses the relationship among four basic emotions under the circumstance of automatic processing through cross-modal delayed response paradigm, whereas the second one discusses that relationship under the circumstance of meta-emotion through image perception paradigm. Both experiments adopt ERPs technique, and choose happiness, disgust, fear and sadness as four basic emotions, and they share the same experiment materials, using standardized pictures to trigger emotion. After the revaluation of the pictures which come from International Affective Picture System (IAPS),20pictures for each of the four emotions and12neutral pictures are chosen. When and how the meta-emotion works will be analyzed through the comparison of the results from these two experiments.Both experiments use electrodes FPz, Fz, Cz, Pz, and Oz to analyze the results. For the first experiment, four emotions appear significant difference in LPP of every period N1,200-300ms,300-400ms, and>400ms, which suggests that the brain waves triggered by the four basic emotions distinct obviously in terms of automatic processing, and multianalysis shows that fear possesses extreme difference from the other three emotions. In experiment2,the difference of four kind of mate-emotion state came up to significant level. Compared the results of two experiments, We concluded that the difference between basic emotion and meta-emotion state didn’t come to significant level during100-200ms, but the difference come to significant start from250ms more or less. The electrode position has significant main effect through further statistical analysis. In conclusion, both positive and negative emotions can experience automatic processing, but the process is achieved through different neural systems. Fear has the most positive amplitude than other three kinds of emotion. meta-emotion’s evaluation and judgment of basic emotions start approximate200-300ms after the stimulation of emotion pictures. Judgment and evaluation of emotion make the the area of brain for cognitive processing wave jointly.