On The Impact Of Emotions On Time Pay Attention To The Research Of Erp

Studies of emotion suggest that processing of emotional information is very fast,and left (right) brain bias in the processing of positive (negative) emotion. Studies oftemporal attention suggest that valid time cues could product attentional effects andtemporal attention may have a modulation in the early perceptual processes. But there islittle of the research about the interaction between emotion and temporal attention.Concerning the problem that the influnce of different emotions on temporal attenitonmay be different, this paper adopt the task paradigm that emotional picture were cued asdifferent time-intervals, simultaneous recording behavioral data and EEG data of the12normal subjects (5women), and using repeated ANOVAL method to analyzeERP(P1/N1, P2) components, and also utilising sLORETA method for sourcelocalization. Among the experimental tasks, there were four different conditionsincluding two types of emotional pictures (negative and positive) and two types of cuetime (short time300ms, and long time1500ms).Behavior results found the attentional effect of temporal attention, which wassimilar to effects of spatial attention, that valid cues of time-intervals could helpsubjects react more quickly and more accurate, and also found that negative emotionsused as long time-interval cues slow down the RTs.Results of cue-related ERPs showed that the emotion should influence on temporalattention in the early time-window (70-145ms), in which negative emotions cued aslong time-intervals induced a greater amplitude. In the other words, negative emotionsmay tend to be sensitive to long time-interval attention. The frontal lobe induced agreater amplitude when processed short time-interval cues, indicating that the frontallobe may be very important to short time-interval attention. The results of cue-relatedERPs latencies showed that frontal lobe had a processing bias to short time-interval cuesduring the early time-window (70-145ms), but in the later time-window (140-200ms)the area was much more sensitive to positive emotions, which implyed that results oflatencies may be a good indicator for the research about the influence of emotion ontemporal attention. Results of target-related ERPs showed that in the long time-interval conditions thelatencies were shorter than the short time-interval condition and amplitudes were alsomuch greater, which meant that temporal attention in the longer time-interval mayrequire more resources. In addition, positive emotion as cues of time-interval induced alarger activation of the brain in the time window of target’s emergence (140-200ms),especially when positive pictures were used as cues of short time-interval, whichsuggested that positive emotion may tend to be sensitive to short time-interval attention.Results of th source localization showed that positive emotional faces activated theleft frontal lobe, and negative emotional faces activated the right frontal lobe. Thedifferent laterality for positive emotions and negative emotions in the frontal lobe,proved the lack in the hypothesis of emotional standards, but also reduced the scope ofvalence hypothesis to the frontal lobe.The main results of the paper verified the laterality for processing positive andnegative emotions in frontal lobe, and found that influence of different emotions on longor short temporal attention should be different, in which negative emotion may tend toaffect long temporal attention soon after the cue and positive emotion may affect shorttemporal attention after disappearing of the target.