Influence Of Unconscious Distraction On Emotional Face Recognition Under Frustration

In daily life,it is very important to accurately understand the emotional information conveyed by others.As the most direct clue of emotional expression,face is the key channel of emotional contagion.Our emotional state will always affect our processing of other people ’s faces.If we are in negative emotions because of frustration,it is easy to misunderstand others,so we need to regulate our emotion.Compared with conscious emotion regulation that consumes cognitive resources,unconscious emotion regulation is more applicable.Previous studies on unconscious emotion regulation have focused on cognitive reappraisal and expression suppression.So what is the mechanism of distraction and how does it affect face processing ? In this paper,behavioral indicators and event-related potentials were combined to explore the effect of unconscious distraction on face processing and its time course under frustration.In this study,49 subjects were recruited after questionnaire screening and randomly divided into unconscious distraction group(17 people),conscious distraction group(16 people)and control group(16 people).After the frustration task,the emotion regulation goal of the unconscious distraction group was initiated through the word matching task.The results showed that the recognition of angry faces under frustration was significantly faster than that under neutral emotions due to mood-congruence,and the accuracy was also significantly improved.Under frustration,the N170 induced by angry faces increased significantly and the EPN amplitude induced by neutral faces decreased.The unconscious distraction strategy had no effect on the early stage and the middle stage,but focused more attention resources on neutral faces in the late stage and regulated the negative emotional experience.The conscious distraction strategy increased the LPP amplitude of the subjects in identifying angry faces under frustration.Conclusion : In the context of frustration,individuals regulate emotions by shifting attention to the coding of face structure in the early stage and reducing the processing of non-emotional information in the middle stage;the unconscious distraction strategy gives neutral faces more attention resources in the late stage of face processing;conscious distraction gives more attention to angry faces in the late stage.