The Neural Bases Of Emotional Conflict In Interpersonal Interaction:ERP Studies

Emotional conflict is developed on the basis of cognitive conflict and become a very important part. Emotional conflict so far basically utilize the cognitive paradigm and logic of cognitive conflict, and focus on studying the impact of emotion on cognitive control tasks, which is closely related to cognitive conflict. Actually, emotion plays a very important role in the day-to-day interpersonal communication. As the primary means of delivering emotional information, facial expression and emotional body language can help people to speculate the mental states of other individuals, however, according to the expectations we generated by the people’s emotions can mismatch their actual behavior in a particular situation, which might generate conflict. Such this type of conflict research is very less, so we hope to be able to reveal the neural mechanisms of emotional conflict in interpersonal interaction to compensate for the deficiencies of this field. This paper is an exploratory study conducted by the emotional conflicts caused by social interaction in facial expression as well as emotional body language.This thesis uses a variant of the ultimatum game, participants have to accept or reject economic offers proposed by several partners who displayed facial and body emotions. The experiments include two independent variables that cues (trustworthy, untrustworthy) and emotional (happy, angry) and there are four conditions (TH: trustworthy happy, UH:untrustworthy happy, TA:trustworthy angry, UA: untrustworthy angry). On every trial, a cue prompted participants of whether they can trust the emotion of their partner or not. Trustworthy (low-conflict) partners is a happy face or body emotions shows money allocation scheme is likely to be beneficial for participants, and if the angry emotion that scheme is likely to be adverse. On the other hand, if is untrustworthy (high-conflict) partners with a happy emotion instead offer is likely to be adverse to participants, the angry mood may be beneficial for participants. According to the results of two studies, behavioral responses are faster for trustworthy than for untrustworthy partner, and the accuracy is higher. It shows untrustworthy partner led to a higher level of conflict and we use the variant of ultimatum game to study the emotional conflict during interpersonal interaction to be effective. ERP results of study one showed that UC (untrustworthy condition) evoked a more negative N2component than TC (trustworthy condition). In addition, UC (180-280ms) and separated by UH (280-380ms) in180-380ms (N2). Participants were likely to be more alert to the angry face or body which were earlier monitoring conflict triggered by UA than UH, so N2components separation of two distinct waveforms in the frontal-parietal region. In addition, UC evoked a smaller P300component than TC. This result might suggest that the higher the levels of conflict and task difficulty, resulting in test memory load greater, making P300amplitude decreases. Meanwhile, in this time window, TA elicited a more positive P300deflection than TH. It may reveal that participant allocate more attention resources and psychological preparation for angry faces so that gave more attention to the angry faces. Study two uses the body emotional pictures. The results showed that the participants monitor the conflict of body emotional which N2components appear in the300-400ms is later than face emotional conflict. And study2didn’t appear happy and angry mood in the separation of300-400ms. It is likely that body emotional information processing is later than face, but not as good as the facial emotion processing fine and clear. Again, this may also shows that face emotional recognition need help from face expression, but perhaps it can be said body emotions may face emotional auxiliary information.In summary, we explored the neural mechanisms of emotional conflict in interpersonal interaction by processing face and body emotional. To a certain extent, this paper complementary research on emotional conflict, enrich this research, the scientific value.