An ERP Study On Implicit Attitudes Towards Homosexuality In College Students

In the past, most Research on people’s attitudes towards homosexuality focused on its explicit attitudes measured mainly through surveys or interviews. It consistently found that people show tolerance and acceptance to homosexuality. In recent years, more and more researchers began to focus on implicit homosexuality attitude. These studies use implicit measure paradigms, but the results are significantly different from explicit attitudes, in other words, college students implicit attitudes toward homosexuality was negative, showing that implicit and explicit attitudes were isolated. However, these studies are limited to behavioral level, lacking of inspecting its inherent neural mechanisms.how the distinctive implicit attitude happened? If there was particular physiological neural mechanism corresponding to it? Meanwhile, previous studies have shown that implicit attitude can change to some extent by behavior change technology, so, whether negative implicit homosexuality attitude could change, and its corresponding neural physiological mechanisms also be affected by behavior change technology? To explore these issues, using event-related potentials (ERP) technology and choosing college students as subjects, the study tried to explore college students’ homosexuality implicit attitude and its’ neurophysiological mechanism by implicit test paradigms. At the same time, we explore whether homosexuality implicit attitudes could be changed by attitude change technology, as well as it’s corresponding neural mechanisms. The study included three experiments:Study1was behavior experiment, we use college students homosexuality Attitude Scale to measure explicit attitudes, WIAT to measure implicit attitudes. The results showed that college students homosexuality explicit attitude was tolerant, but implicit attitude is negative. At the same time, there was no correlation between implicit and explicit attitudes, namely, showing separation.Study2measured brain activity when college students completing the implicit test by ERP, The results show that N400and LPP evoked by compatibility group (gay vocabulary words combined with negative reactions) and incompatible groups (gay vocabulary and active vocabulary joint response) target words are significant differences. Compared with incompatible tasks, ERP evoked by compatible group more positive.Study3explored neural mechanisms of college students implicit homosexuality attitude change by Evaluative Conditioning technology. The results showed that the experiment group showed significant negative implicit homosexuality attitudes. After intervention, this negative attitude disappeared. Meanwhile in the ERP results, the significant N400and LPP effects correlated with negative implicit attitude found in the pre-test disappeared in the post-test after attitude intervention.Summary these experimental results, we can draw the conclusion that the college explicit and implicit attitudes toward homosexuality was separate. Negative homosexuality implicit attitudes had its unique neurophysiological performance, different tasks’ stimulus material semantic consistency and emotional consistency differences represented by N400and LPP effects is the physiological basis of implicit attitude and it’s transformation.