The Effect Of Negative Emotions On Conflict Adaptation Effect Relevance

This study examines the effect of task-relatedness of negative emotional stimuli on conflict adaptation in different cognitive control paradigms.The cognitive control paradigm selected the Flanker task and the Simon task.Study 1 adopts 2(emotional valence: negative,neutral)x 2(task correlations of emotional stimuli: task-related,task-independent)x 2(consistency of previous trial: consistent,inconsistent)x 2(consistency of current trial: consistent,inconsistent).It adapted Flanker's task according to the look-to-do paradigm and examined the effect of negative emotion stimuli on the adaptive effects of conflict under the conditions of task-related and irrelevance.It is found that when emotional stimuli are related to tasks,negative emotions can promote the generation of conflict adaptation effects;when emotion stimuli are irrelevant to tasks,negative emotions hinder the production of conflict adaptation effects.In order to further examine whether the effect of emotion-stimulus correlation on conflict adaptation effects varies with emotional tasks,Study 2 measured the effect of task-related negative emotions on conflict adaptation in Simon task.The results show that the negative emotion stimuli can promote the conflict adaptation effect when related to the task;but when the negative emotion stimuli are irrelevant to the task,there is no difference between the impact of negative emotion on the conflict adaptation effect and that of the neutral emotion.The conflict of Flanker task mainly occurs in the sensational sensation stage,which mainly involves semantic or conceptual competition;and the conflict of Simon task mainly occurs in the late stage of reaction choice,which mainly involves the reaction process or reaction output process.Since the time of stimulus conflict and reaction conflict exists in a sequence,and this study adopts a transient,weakly changing emotional state,which is more in line with the time specification of the conflict adaptation effect,when reaction conflicts occur when the production order is later,Emotional stimuli that are not related to tasks are likely to have weakened or even disappeared emotions,resulting in the loss of emotional effects when the Simon task is completed,and therefore appear different effects in different cognitive control paradigms.