Effects Of Emotion On The Process Of Interference Inhibition In Individuals With High And Low Affective Working Memory: Evidence From ERP

People with limited cognitive resources are not able to process multiple pieces of information simultaneously,and for them to better achieve their goals,they need to use executive functions such as cognitive control and interference inhibition to process complex information.In this scenario,the task could clash with emotional cues provided by the environment,impairing the individual’s ability to inhibit interference.The emotion is a complex and changeable physiological and psychological phenomenon that regulates the behavior and cognitive activities of an individual in the face of complex and changeable conflict situations based on the emotional information,which resides in the stimulus.Research in the field of emotional influence disturbance inhibition has led to a variety of conclusions,but most studies only examined emotional valence.However,emotion is a complex concept that includes factors such as emotional arousal,emotional response,and emotional state.There is evidence that these factors also have an impact on the individual’s interference inhibition process,so the above emotional factors affect the individual’s working memory.Quite simply,affective working memory is a subsystem of working memory that provides the basis for higher-order emotional thinking.Affective working memory is primarily involved in storing emotions as a result of physiological activities within the body,as opposed to cognitive working memory,which stores external information.The Stroop and Flanker tasks are related to interference inhibition,yet they examine different dimensions.Stroop investigates the conflict between individual meaning and word color,whereas Flanker investigates the inhibition of stimuli that are unrelated.Therefore,this study investigates the impact of emotion on the interference inhibition process of high and low affective working memory individuals,explains the relationship between emotion and interference inhibition and the mechanism between the two from the two dimensions of the Stroop task(study 1)and Franker task(study 2),and observes the change in brain activity of individuals.Study 1 selected 62 college students or graduate students as participants,and used the two-color Stroop task to investigate the changes in the interference inhibition process of high and low affective working memory individuals after emotional induction from the two levels of behavior and EEG.The behavioral results showed that compared with the induction of neutral emotions,the response time of individuals with high and low emotional working memory after negative and positive emotion induction was significantly reduced,indicating that negative emotions and positive emotions had a promoting effect on the interference inhibition of high and low emotional working memory individuals.The ERP results found that the N2 and P3 amplitudes of the highaffected working memory group did not differ significantly under the three emotioninducing conditions,which showed that emotion did not affect the conflict monitoring process of high-affected working memory individuals.Compared with the high-affected working memory group,the individuals in the low-affected working memory group were affected by emotions,specifically,the N2 amplitude of low-affected working memory was significantly reduced after positive emotion induction,and the P3 component of the low-affected working memory group was also affected by emotions,and the P3 amplitude after positive induction was the highest,followed by negative,and the lowest neutral.The P3 amplitude of the high-affectivity working memory group was significantly higher than that of the low-affectivity working memory group,indicating that the low-affective working memory group invested less cognitive resources in post-conflict management than the high-affective working memory group.Study 2 selected 65 college students or graduate students as participants,and used the arrow Franker task to investigate the changes in the interference inhibition process of high and low emotional working memory individuals after emotional induction from the two levels of behavior and EEG.The behavioral results showed that compared with the induction of neutral emotions,the response of individuals with high and low emotional working memory after negative and positive emotion induction was significantly reduced,indicating that negative emotions and positive emotions had a promoting effect on the interference and inhibition of behavioral performance in high and low affective working memory individuals.The ERP results showed that the N2 amplitude of the high-affected working memory group did not differ significantly under the three emotion-inducing conditions,and this result showed that emotion did not affect the conflict monitoring process of the high-affected working memory group;compared with the high-affectivity working memory group,the individuals in the low-affectivity working memory group had significantly reduced the N2 amplitude after negative emotion induction.The P3 analysis found that there was no significant change in the P3 amplitude of individuals in the highaffected working memory group after negative and neutral emotion induction,but the P3 amplitude decreased significantly after positive emotion induction,indicating that positive emotions reduced the cognitive load of high-affective working memory individuals.After positive and negative emotion induction,the P3 amplitude of individuals in the low-affective working memory group increased significantly,indicating that emotion hindered the later conflict processing process of low-affective working memory individuals.In conclusion,the conflict processing abilities of persons with low affective working memory was better than that of those with strong affective working memory at the physiological level,without surpassing the individual’s restricted cognitive resources.Individuals with limited emotional working memory capacity compensate by having a strong conflict processing capacity.As a result,the high and low affective working memory groups use various tactics to enhance behavioural performance on the interference inhibition task in order to prevent the detrimental impacts of emotions interfering with the task at hand.