EEG Study Of Emotional Body-Word Stroop Conflict Processing

Cognitive control refers to the ability to direct attentional resources toward task-related information while inhibiting task-irrelevant distractors. Such control is vitally important in the maintenance of normal cognitive functions. Significant emotional stimuli might have the opportunity to gain priority access to cognitive processing in numerous situations and consequently to interfere with human goal-directed behavior. Thus, to adapt to a changing environment, humans must resolve conflicts stemming from emotion-laden stimuli. In laboratory settings, this type of conflict has been investigated using several emotional Stroop paradigms. Although many studies have explored the neural dynamics and brain structures associated with the resolution of emotional conflict, the neural correlates of the conflict resolution process are still unclear. Thus far, the neural dynamics of emotional conflict have been mainly investigated through the emotional face-word task, and it is unclear whether the aforementioned neural N450 and SP effect could be replicated in other emotional conflict tasks. Moreover, the above studies are limited to fMRI and ERP techniques, and few studies have investigated the neural oscillatory activity changes associated with processing emotional conflict. In addition, few study investigate how other factors influence emotional conflict processing. To sum up, the current study design five experiment to explore whether 1) emotional body-word task could replicate classic N450 and SP Potential; 2) whether stimuli valence affect emotional conflict processing; 3) whether emotional body-word and face-word task shares similar behavioral and neural dynamic? 4) Whether conflict trial ratio affect emotional conflict processing; 5) whether sex differ in emotional conflict processing. We found that 1) Results indicated increased response time and decreased accuracy in the incongruent condition relative to the congruent condition, indicating a robust interference effect. Furthermore, the incongruent condition evoked pronounced N450 amplitudes and a more positive slow potential, which might be associated with conflict-monitoring and conflict resolution.2) Behavioral results show that both task replicate previous robust interference effect. On the physiological level, two tasks show dissociable neural activity at early attention and perception stage, and face task exhibit pronounced N1 and P2 amplitudes than body task. However, two tasks evoked comparable N450 amplitudes. At later stage, positive slow potential was modulated by target emotion, with increased amplitude for face task. In addition, time-frequency analysis also found that face task induce enhanced theta activity than body task.3) valence affect emotional conflict processing. at behavioral level. Participant commit fewer errors and respond faster in mixed-valence background than negative background.4) the ratio of conflict trial exert influence emotional conflict processing, N450 was comparable between congruent and incongruent condition with high incongruent trial, while incongruent condition evokes larger N450 than incongruent condition with low incongruent trial. However, ration of incongruent trial have no effect on SP amplitude.5) sex differs in emotional conflict processing, and female evoked pronounced N450 amplitude than males, while SP was not statistically significant between male and females. The findings of present study contribute to the literature by showing that,l) body-word Stroop task is a valid task, which could be regard as a complimentary tools; 2) Three-stage processing are involved in emotional Stroop conflict;3) emotional Stroop are both domain-general and domain-specific.4) emotional Stroop are modulated by conflict ratio, sex of participants and valence-context. Future investigation should explore the brain areas involved in body-word conflict processing, the similarity and dissimilatriy of brain areas between face-word and body-word task, the source of Theta oscillation, the interaction between Theta and other band oscillation.