| Many studies have shown that negative emotional stimuli usually attract individual's attention more quickly and obtain priority on psychological processing.This psychological processing characteristic was formed and consolidated in the process of human evolution,and has the adaptability of survival.In all kinds of negative emotions,sadness is very common in daily life.Compared to other types of negative emotions(such as anger,disgust,or fear),the arousal level of sadness is lower,so it is not easy to identify.Besides,it can sometimes last for a long time which will injure the individual's physical and mental health.In intimate relationships,identifying romantic partner's various negative emotional states timely and accurately is crucial to the development and promotion of the intimate relationships.Studies have found that romantic love can promote the negative emotion recognition of individual.Compared with single individuals,individuals in love usually perform better in the negative emotion recognition task.And according to neuroimaging studies,romantic love is likely to show long-term effects on individual's brain structure,which mainly shows on that the functional connection strength in brain areas associated with social cognition will increase as the dating time goes on.However,in the past researches about romantic love and negative emotion cognition,researchers usually ask subjects to complete the task related to negative emotion under the condition of "love priming"(by seeing photos or names of their partners).These researches' conclusions only indicate that romantic love has influence on individual's negative emotion cognition under the condition of "love priming",however it's not clear yet whether romantic love can affect individual's negative emotion processing capacity in general situation.Furthermore,in these studies,negative emotions are often used as a distraction or an emotional trigger rather than a direct target task stimulus,so it is not clear yet whether romantic love has an impact on individuals' cognition of negative emotions.In addition,most of the existing researches were based on a cross-sectional study design which only compared differences in a variety of task results between single individuals and love individuals,but this comparison is not causality.Therefore,the causality between romantic love and individual's negative emotion processing is not clear.At the same time,there are gender differences in emotional information processing,and women are better at identifying and judging other people's emotions than men.And in the field of romantic relationships,researchers also found that men and women exist differences in mood and emotion expression.In general,women are more sensitive and emotional than men.They have more emotional expression,and always require more attention payed by their male partners.There have been no studies investing the gender differences in the effects of romantic love has on individual's negative emotion cognition.Combined with the discussion above,our main research target is to explore the interaction between romantic love,negative emotion cognition and gender.In this study we conducted the “sadness judgment task” and “sadness Stroop task”,combining crosssectional design with follow-up design,to invest the effects of romantic love has on the negative emotion cognitive processing from the perspective of behavioral science.In study one we designed two cross-sectional experimental tasks: sadness emotion judgment task and sadness emotional Stroop task.(1)in sadness judgment task,we recruited 84 college students as subjects,and divided them in two groups.The love group included 44 subjects(30 females and 14 males),and the single included 40 people(21 females and 19 males).The subjects were asked to identify the sadness and happiness facial pictures presented on the computer and to make corresponding key responses.The experimental dependent variable was reaction time(RT)to the button response of the facial pictures.The results showed that the interaction between love state and gender is significant,and its specific performance is that the RT of sadness facial picture was significantly lower in the male-love group than in the male-single group,while for the female,it has not showed any significantly differences in RT between two groups.(2)in sadness Stroop task,we recruited 96 college students as subjects.The love group included 47 subjects(26 females and 21 males),and the single group included 49(34 females and 15 males).In the task we showed facial pictures with Chinese characters to subjects and asked them to judge facial emotional mood by ignoring the meaning of Chinese characters,then pressed the corresponding buttons.The dependent variable is the RT to the facial pictures.The results showed that the interaction between love state and gender is significant.More precisely,the RT to the conflicting facial pictures of the male-love group were significantly lower than those in the male-single group,while for the female,there was not significant differences between the single group and love group.In study two,six months after the end of the study one,we recruited the subjects whose state of love has not changed during this period to complete the same two tasks used in study one.(1)for the task of judging sadness,there were 44 subjects,20 of the single group(12 females and 8 males),22 in the love group(12 females and 10 males).The subjects were asked to complete the task of sadness judgment,and the dependent variable were their RT on the judgment of sad mood pictures.The main results showed that the interaction between love state,gender and test time is significant.More precisely,the RT of sadness images in the male-love group was significantly lower than that in the male-single group both in the pre-test and post-test tasks.In addition,the sadness judgment RT for the malelove group in the post-test was significantly lower than that of the pre-test task,and the male-single group was not significantly different in RT between the two measurements.(2)for the sadness Stroop task,41 subjects were included,20 in the single group(12 females and 8 males),and 21 in love group(11 females and 10 males).The participants were asked to complete the sadness Stroop task again,and dependent variables were the RT of the two types of images in the face-word inconsistency condition.No significant difference was found in all the main effects and interactions.Based on the above results,the following conclusions are drawn from this study:(1)Romantic love can promote individual's cognitive processing speed of negative emotions.(2)There are significant gender differences in the promotion of romantic love acts on the cognitive processing of negative emotions.Romantic love can improve the negative emotional cognitive ability of male individuals more effectively than female individuals.The results prove that "love makes people grow",namely romantic relationship is not only an important source social and emotional support for people,also has a positive impact for individual's emotional cognitive abilities.At the same time,it provides a clear direction for single individuals who want to establish close relationships.The research results have important theoretical and practical significance. |
PDF Full Text Request