The Influence Of Evaluator's Status On The Individual's Processing Of Evaluator's Emotion: Evidence From An ERP Study

According to the social construction theory of emotion,emotion is not only an internal event,but also emerges from social interactions and relationships.Therefore,the processing of emotion are affected by the social interactions and relationships.As one of the important vertical dimensions of social hierarchy,social status affects the experience,expression and recognition of emotions significantly.However,we find that previous studies on social status and emotional processing have at least two limitations.On the one hand,the previous research paradigm mainly investigated the influence of social status on isolated and static emotional faces,but did not investigate the influence of social status on emotional processing in dynamic interactive situations.On the other hand,most previous studies used behavioral experiments to explore the relationship between social status and emotional processing,but did not examine the neural mechanism of social status affecting emotional processing.With the help of eventrelated potentials(ERPs),the present study created an social status based on an interactive game to explore the neural mechanism of evaluator status affecting individual's emotional processing.Specifically,we first manipulated the evaluators' social status(high and low)through the time-estimation task.Then,under the conditions of no reward or punishment(experiment 1)and with reward and punishment(experiment 2),the evaluators were asked to estimate the participants' performance in the task of time estimation by presenting the forms of expression feedback(happiness,neutrality and anger).The electroencephalogram data(EEG)were recorded from subjects while they watched the evaluators' facial feedback.Experiment 1 found that: in the early components,P1 amplitudes were more positive when the high-status evaluators gave the happy expression feedback,compared to low-status evaluators who also gave the happy expression feedback.For the VPP component,the happy expression feedback given by high-status evaluators induced more possitive VPP amplitudes than the low-status counterparts.However,there was no interaction between evaluators' status and feedback emotions in the N2 and P3 components.Experiment 2 found that: in the early components,P1 amplitudes were more positive when the happy and anger expression feedbacks were given by low-status evaluators compared to high-status evaluators.Likewise,the happy expression feedback of low-status evaluators induced more possitive VPP amplitudes compared to high-status evaluators.As for later N2 and P3 components,N2 amplitudes were more negative when the high-status evaluators give the happy expression feedback,compared to the happy expression feedback given by low-status evaluators.More positive P3 amplitudes were obtained when the high-status evaluators gave the happy and neutrality expression feedbacks,compared to the anger expression feedback.In addition,for the low-status evaluators,not only did the happy and neutrality expression feedbacks induce more positive P3 amplitudes than the anger expression feedback,but the P3 amplitudes induced by happy expression feedback were more positive than that induced by neutrality expression feedback.According to the results of experiment 1 and experiment 2,we found that under the condition of no reward or punishment,the evaluator's status and the type of feedback emotion jointly affected the components of P1 and VPP,which indicates that the evaluator's status affects the early stage of individual emotional processing.Under the condition of rewards and punishments,the status of evaluators and the types of feedback emotions jointly affected the components of P1,VPP,N2 and P3,which indicats that the status of evaluators affects not only the early stage of individuals' emotional processing;but also the later stage of individuals' emotional processing.