A Study On Emotion And Stroop Effect Of Middle School Students In Anxiety

Objective:Firstly, this experiment researches high school anxious students’ emotion stroop affect using emotional pictures as stimulus material and adopting the emotion stroop paradigm. Secondly, this paper explores the characteristics of high anxiety students’ attentional bias and memory bias. Lastly, according to the survey result, this paper wants to provide useful advice to current high school students mental health.Research methods:The research one through "State-Trait Anxiety Inventory" screens out high school students with different trait anxiety level. Experiments to be carried out in two days, on the first day of the experiment,20 neutral, positive and negative pictures were selected from the international affective picture system (IAPS) as the starting emotion stimulus, and imaged for the affective pictures with red, yellow, blue, green four kinds of color frame. The subjects were asked to determine as soon as possible the color of the picture frame and the reaction time was recorded. The color of the frame and the content of affective pictures was random combination. On the second day of the experiment, the subjects should go on recognition memory test that subjects were asked to determine which picture presented on the first day as soon as possible.In the research two, using the "State-Trait Anxiety Inventory" to test the subjects’ anxiety level, then the subjects were randomly assigned into the experimental group and control group, each group of 21 subjects. Before the start of the emotion stroop task, in order to explore the emotional characteristics of induced anxiety group of high school students, the experimental group was told that they will accept the 100 decibels treble stimulation. And the control group did not induce anxiety. However, in the second day of the recognition test, let the subjects do the recognition test under a state of calm and without inducting anxiety. Other experiment process and materials were the same as the experiment one.Lastly, this study through "Coping Style Questionnaire" conducted a survey of 200 high school students to investigate in the coping style of high school students with different anxiety level.Results:(1)The repetitive measure analysis of variance shows that in the high trait anxiety group, the subjects reaction to negative pictures is significantly higher than that of the neutral and positive pictures, but low trait anxiety group do not show this kind of response bias. It means negative picture has strong interference effect on the high trait anxiety of middle school students’attentional bias, namely high trait anxiety group may have attention bias to the negative pictures. In the recognition test, high anxiety subjects of neutral and positive pictures recognition accuracy is significantly lower than low anxiety subjects, and there is no significant difference in negative pictures. The result suggests that high anxiety subjects do little memory encoding for the positive emotion information. Besides, high anxiety subjects have significantly higher recognition accuracy of the negative pictures than the neutral and positive pictures that they may also have a certain memory bias for negative information.(2)Reaction time of border color judgment in the induced anxiety group is significantly higher than that of control group, but the two groups do not exist significant differences on recognition accuracy. It means that in the face of emotional stimulation, high school students’ high anxiety state can also affect their attention to the emotional information encoding. However, if the individual can recover from this state of high anxiety, one can avoid too much memory of emotional information encoding.(3)The questionnaire shows that trait anxiety has a significant positive correlation with self-blame, fantasy, retreat and also has significant negative correlation with problem solving. There is no significant correlation between state anxiety and coping styles.Conclusion:High school students with trait anxiety will not only produce attentional biases for negative emotional information, but also produce a memory bias on the negative information. However, in a state of anxiety may not be the key reason to affect the attention and memory encoding of negative information. If the students are induced in the high anxiety, they show no attention and memory bias to negative emotional information, but show prolonged effect to the neutral, positive and negative emotional content and have memory bias to these three kinds of emotional information. Therefore, our study suggests that effect of trait anxiety and state anxiety of high school students is different and the negative emotion information attentional bias caused by trait anxiety may be an important factor affecting a series of problems such as learning、communication and the mental health of high school students.