The Influences Of Trust Violation On Cognitive Control And Its Neural Mechanisms

Trust permeates all social activities,and it is of great significance to individual mental health,organizational performance,social stability,and economic development.Trust is relatively fragile,and trust violation will have a negative impact on the individual’s social function.At present,research mainly focuses on how to repair trust violation.However,it is still unclear how individual cognition changes before the repair phase.Previous studies have preliminarily explored the impact of trust violation on cognitive control based on the conservation of resources,but in general,there is still a lack of research in this area.First,existing studies only focus on the impact of trust violation on working memory updating,however working memory updating and inhibitory control are both core components of cognitive control,and they are closely related.Whether trust violation also affects inhibitory control? Secondly,emotional and non-emotional cognitive controls are different in neural mechanism and functional performance,and trust violation will increase the cognitive bias to negative stimuli.Does the processing of emotional stimuli affect the relationship between trust violation and cognitive control? Finally,emotional cognitive control also plays an important role in resolving conflicts at the level of interpersonal interaction,and trust violation is a product of interpersonal interaction,so it is necessary to explore the impact of trust violation on emotional cognitive control in the context of interpersonal interaction.Based on the above three points,this study will explore the impact of trust violation on cognitive control and its neural mechanism through five studies from three aspects:sub-components of cognitive control,emotionality of processed stimuli,and interpersonal interaction situations.In this paper,the trust game was used to manipulate trust violation,and then subjects are asked to complete cognitive control tasks while recording EEG activity.Previous studies have explored the effect of trust violation on non-emotional working memory updating,and study 1 directly examines the effect of trust violation on emotional working memory updating on this basis.Study 1 examined the effect of trust violation on emotional working memory updating through an EEG experiment.The emotional 2-back task was used to measure the ability of emotional working memory updating.Results showed that compared to the control group,the violation group had smaller P2 and P3 amplitudes both in emotional and nonemotional contexts and larger N2 amplitudes in the emotional contexts.These results suggest that trust violation results in the inefficient allocation of attention in the early attention(P2)and updating maintenance stages(P3)regardless of the emotional type of the material.Trust violation also improve the abilities of response inhibition,conflict monitoring,or sequential match(N2)when processing emotional material,which may play a compensatory role to maintain a level of behavioral performance comparable to the control group.Therefore,the effect of trust violation on emotional working memory updating is not simply a hindering effect but makes individuals adopt different resource allocation strategies in the emotional working memory updating task.The purpose of Study 2 and Study 3 was to examine the effect of trust violation on non-emotional and emotional inhibitory control(response inhibition and conflict control).In Study 2,two EEG experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of trust violation on the non-emotional and emotional response inhibitory control.Specifically,in experiments 2 and 3,the non-emotional response inhibition ability was measured by the graphical version of the Go/No-Go task,and the negative and neutral face versions of the Go/No-Go task were used to measure the response inhibition ability toward negative stimuli.These results found that trust violation did not have a significant effect on the ability of non-emotional response inhibition.In the condition of no-go,when processing negative stimuli,the violation group had smaller P3 amplitudes than the control group,indicating that trust violation reduces the resource allocation in the response inhibition towards negative stimuli.Under the go condition to negative stimuli,the violation group had greater N2 amplitudes than the control group,which may indicate that trust violation increases the processing impulse to negative stimuli.In Study 3,two EEG experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of trust violation on non-emotional and emotional conflict control.In experiments 4 and 5,the color-word Stroop paradigm was used to measure the non-emotional conflict control ability,and the emotional face-word Stroop was used to measure the emotional conflict control ability.The results found that trust violation had no significant effect on non-emotional conflict control.In the emotional conflict control task,the target stimulus was the angry face and the interference stimulus was the happy word,the violation group had longer response times than the control group.When the target stimulus was a happy face and the interference stimulus was an angry word,the violation group had smaller SP amplitudes than the control group.These results indicate that trust violation hinders emotional conflict control ability,and this hindering effect will be separated in behavioral and EEG indicators with different target stimulus valence.Trust violation does not affect non-emotional conflict control.The purpose of the Study 4 is to integrate the resource-limited theory and the dual competition model from the perspective of proactive and reactive control.This study examined the effect of trust violation on emotional dual cognitive control through an EEG experiment.Specifically,in Experiment 6,we adopted the emotional face-word Stroop task and manipulated the ratio of conflict trials to create different environments for inducing proactive control(interference trials were more frequent)and reactive control(interference trials were more frequent)relatively.It was found that,in reactive control,when the target was a happy face and the interfering stimulus was an angry stimulus,the violation group had smaller SP amplitudes than the control group.In proactive control,there was no significant difference between the two groups.These results may suggest that in emotional dual cognitive control,trust violation impairs reactive but not proactive control to negative interference stimuli.In Study 5,we used an EEG experiment to further examine how trust violation affects emotional conflict control in an interpersonal interaction context.An adaptation of the Ultimatum game was used to measure emotional conflict control in interpersonal interactions.In this game,participants had to rely on cues about the trustworthiness of their partner and the partner’s facial expressions to decide whether to accept or reject a partner’s money offer.When the partner was trustworthy,the subjects were able to infer their behavior from the partner’s expression.The happy face indicates that the partner will make a favorable choice for the subject(that is,give the subject more money),while the angry face indicates that the partner will make an unfavorable choice(that is,give the subject less money).When the partner was untrustworthy,the partner’s expression and behavior were opposite.The happy face indicates that they will make a choice that is not good for the subject,and the angry face indicates that they will make a choice that is good for the subject.Previous studies have shown that the untrustworthy cue creates a high conflict condition compared to the trustworthy cue.The results of this study found that in the cue processing stage,the violation group had larger P3 amplitudes when processing untrustworthy cues than trustworthy cues,while the control group had larger P3 amplitudes when processing trustworthy cues than untrustworthy cues.In the target stage,the violation group had a larger P3 amplitude when processing angry faces than happy faces,while the control group had no significant difference in P3 amplitudes when processing angry faces and happy faces.These results suggest that trust violation increases an individual’s cognitive resource allocation to negative stimuli that refer not only to angry faces but also to untrustworthy cues with threatening social implications.In the goal stage,under the untrustworthy condition,when processing happy faces,the violation group has smaller SP amplitudes than the control group,and the SP amplitude was significantly negatively correlated with the response time.That is,under conditions where the partner’s expression conflicts with their actual behavior,the trust violation leads to a decrease in the individual’s conflict resolution ability for happy faces.To sum up,through five studies and seven EEG experiments,this paper systematically investigated the effects of trust violation on cognitive control and its neural mechanisms from the perspectives of sub-components of cognitive control,emotionality of processed stimuli,and interpersonal interaction situations.The research mainly draws the following conclusions: First,the impairment of trust violation on non-emotional cognitive control is reflected in the attention stage(P2)and the maintenance stage(P3)of working memory updating,but has no significant impact on non-emotional response inhibition and conflict control.Second,trust violation will increase the cognitive bias to negative stimuli,which is reflected in the increased impulse response to angry faces(go N2),and the allocation of more resources in the processing of interpersonal untrustworthy clues and angry faces(P3).Third,emotional stimulation will affect the relationship between trust violation and cognitive control.Trust violation causes individuals to adopt different resource allocation strategies in the task of emotional working memory updating;trust violation hinders the ability of response inhibition(no go P3),emotional conflict control,and reactive cognitive control(SP)to negative stimuli;in the context of interpersonal interaction,when facing a conflict environment that is positive on the surface but may actually be unfavorable to oneself,trust violation reduces the resource allocation(SP)in the conflict resolution stage,and the conflict resolution ability decreases.The innovation of this paper lies in: First,from the research perspective,this research will focus on the stage from trust violation to trust repair,and discuss how the cognition of the trustor is affected.On the one hand,it enriches and expands the relationship between trust violation and cognitive control,on the other hand,it provides a new perspective for trust repair.In the process of trust repair,we can consider the characteristics of the trusted party’s cognitive control over emotional stimuli and the interpersonal interaction situation,so as to provide more targeted repair strategies.Secondly,in terms of research methods,this study provides research evidence for the impact of trust violation on cognitive processing with the help of ERP technology.The combination of cognitive processing and results can help us understand the relationship between trust violation and cognitive control more deeply and comprehensively.Thirdly,theoretically,based on the resource limited theory and the dual competition model,this study systematically explored the influence of trust violation on non emotional and emotional cognitive control.The relationship model between trust violation and state cognitive control is preliminarily constructed,which provides a theoretical framework for the subsequent empirical research.