The Influence Of Uncertain Punishment On Conflict Adaptation Effect Of Middle School Students

For the past few years,a lot of corporal punishment has happened on campus,which has an important impact on the healthy growth of teenagers.Studies have shown that uncertain negative events will occupy cognitive resources and damage cognitive processing.However,as punishment is a negative event,no research has been conducted to investigate how the uncertainty of punishment affects cognitive processing.Conflict adaptation refers the increase in cognitive control after previous conflic.This study aims to explore the effect of uncertain punishment on middle school students’ conflict adaptation through three experiments.In Experiment 1,middle school students aged between 12 and 15 completed the experiment.The experiment consisted of noise stimulation and the Stroop task.The results demonstrated that interference caused by conflict in one trial substantially increased in the subsequent trial.The inverse conflict adaptation is found under the condition of uncertain noise penalty,and the conflict adaptation under the condition of uncertain noise penalty was significantly lower than that under the condition of certain noise penalty.Experiment 2 also used noise stimulation as punishment.Middle school students aged 12 to 15 were selected as subjects.Different from Experiment 1,Experiment 2used Flanker task instead of Stroop task in order to measure conflict adaptation.The results also demonstrated that interference caused by conflict in one trial substantially increased in the subsequent trial.The inverse conflict adaptation is found under the condition of uncertain noise penalty,and the conflict adaptation under the condition of uncertain noise penalty was significantly lower than that under the condition of certain noise penalty.Experiment 3 used monetary loss as punishment stimulus,and middle school students aged between 12 and 15 completed the experiment,and conflict adaptation was measured using the Stroop task.The results also demonstrated that interference caused by conflict in one trial substantially increased in the subsequent trial.The inverse conflict adaptation is found under the condition of uncertain noise penalty,and the conflict adaptation under the condition of uncertain noise penalty was significantly lower than that under the condition of certain noise penalty.The results of this study indicate that uncertainty punishment can damage middle school students’ ability to adapt to conflict,and this result is stable,and is not affected by the experimental paradigm and punishment type.