A Study On The Emotional Sensitivity Of Self-injury College Students-based On The Facial Emotion Recognition

Self-injury is a kind of pathological behavior which exists in different country and culture all around the world. In recent years, the emotion regulation function of the Self-injury behavior has become current research focus. There are some researchers put forward that self-injury people have high emotional sensitivity, and they are especially sensitive to something threatening and negative in the social clues and stimulus. Some behavioral experiments have done to test this theory while the results are not consistent. What’s more, there is few research in the field of self-injury people’s emotional sensitivity in our country. According to the Epidemiological survey of self-injury in the nonclinical sample, the incidence of it is still high in the group of college student. In order to help college mental health staff in Chinese campus to understand the reason why they hurt themselves and the characteristics of self-injury people, so as to help them to take a good method to regulate their emotion. It is indispensable to explore the emotional sensitivity of self-injury people, for the sake of continuous enrich the theory of self-injury and provide new ideas for the self-injurious behavior intervention.At present, research has not seek the impact of different emotional state on the emotional sensitivity of self-injury people, so this paper will focus on the question that the emotional sensitivity is related to emotional state or not, it is a trait or depends on different emotional state. In order to learn more about the characteristic of the emotional sensitivity, the campus students, who have self-injury behavior, are explored. In this study, we choose self-injury college students from four universities in Wuhan as our research objects. This study was composed of following two studies:The first research tested the emotional sensitivity of self-injury college students in normal mood state by using Multimorph Facial Affect Recognition Task(MFART).The results showed that self-injury college students could recognize emotion at lower threshold than normal college students, especially the expression of angry, contempt, disgust and sad. However, there were no significant differences between two groups on the accuracy of emotion recognition. (1) The main effects of emotion types were significant. The threshold of correctly identified expression of happy is significantly lower than the rest five expression.(2) The main effects of group types were significant. The threshold of correctly identified expression is significantly lower than the normal college students. (3) The interaction of groups and emotion types was significant. The threshold of correctly identified expression of disgust,sad,angry and contempt of self-injury group is significantly lower than the contrast group. (4) According to the accuracy of emotion recognition, The main effects of emotion types were significant. there is no difference between happy expression and sad expression, but the accuracy of happy expression recognition is significantly higher than the disgust, fear, angry, contempt expression recognition.(5) According to the accuracy of emotion recognition, The main effects of group types were not significant. There were no differences between two groups on the accuracy of emotion recognition.The second study takes the same paradigm to explore the impact of negative mood state on the emotional sensitivity of self-injury college students. Findings revealed that there was no significant difference between negative emotions priming group and control group on the threshold of correctly identified expression, and the negative mood state will not reduce the accuracy of emotion recognition.